It's undeniable that countries are pressured. Look at El Salvador and the unrelenting salvo of bad press they get over starting to accept Bitcoin as legal tender.

The IMF immediately told them that they would no longer be elligible for any IMF loans or financial transactions until they sold all Bitcoin they owned and rolled back the Bitcoin legislation. And the kicker, El Salvador bought and held XX million dollars worth of Bitcoin (last I checked), while their GDP was XX,XXX million dollars, and the loans that they roll were for X,XXX dollars.

There aren't many other players at nation state level like the IMF... so they can exert a lot of pressure on monetary policy. If you want another example, look at how the IMF dealt with Greece.

Yes, organizations do (and should exert) pressure when they give something, but is it done against the will of the citizens (i.e., government agreeing to things the citizens don't want. A vocal opposition is not enough to claim that)? A country is free to isolate itself etc. if the people there are happy with it.

can you find people in Cyprus that were enthusiastic about losing money so that the government can pay bankers' gambling debts?

a 2-3 verified examples will suffice, tia.

Depends what the alternative would have been... lose all deposits?

You are not aware at all how Cyprus went down, are you?

The banking holiday was declared in Cyprus, banks and ATMs shutodnw, everyone local is locked out completely, meanwhile deposits were drained by the rich international depositors thru oversease branches that remained open.

Why do you love defending the indefensible so much? Take the L and move on.

How would you know what I know about what happened in Cyprus?

Was what happened the best possible result - probably not. But I would say that goes for all European responses to the financial crisis then - but that is not the same as being totally indefensible. The question has to be: what outcome could we have now that would be better and what should we have done then and could that have been done? And with Cyprus one issue is the smallness of the economy, which meant what a US might be able to do might not be possible for them on their own.

EDIT: and one of the issues in Europe certainly seems to be that broad, untailored measures are not very popular even though ex-post they appear to perform better - so popular opinion does matter

Do you think Germany should use more cash or less?

I can imagine that only a tiny minority of citizens was fine with it when Cyprus' government closed the banks in 2013 for a couple of days and took some additional percents of already taxed balances.

Who really would be fine with giving the government 10% of their money, so they can pay their gambling debts?

That has nothing to do with whether countries are pressured or not. The fact is, the standards from those groups are huge pressure on countries to conform.

They offer money, but with strings attached. Either the country conforms or it doesn’t get the money.

But do the citizens of those countries using those rules mostly object to those rules? Do Germans or Italians want different anti-money laundering standards, for example?

> Do Germans or Italians want different anti-money laundering standards, for example?

Yes. Germany is the highest user of cash in G-7 and has radically different views on privacy from other G-7/G-20 country, doesn't even have a centralized citizen register.

They have very little in common with Italy on many aspects, and certainly standards would vary as well.

But what does it matter? You think supra-national organizations actually care what some little people think?

Show me the survey on AML, please.

Edit: German citizens are all properly in registers, more local, but very registered nonetheless. You need to have government ID by law. Plus there is a national tax ID.

Do tell: how do you think these standards are established? By performing surveys or some other democratic/rule of law/other ritual?

FATF is an unelected, undemocratic body, where you have absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia and authoritarian states like Russia audit the free/democratic/morebuzzwords West.

I can only imagine you think voting matters too.

It doesn’t, never did.