Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing banking here in Thailand and the notion of private and confidential banking. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article in the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamailmail.com, the article is titled: Does Thailand really want humble expats anymore? So I urge those who are watching this video, go check out this article in detail. I'm going to quote a line from it but there's a lot of insight in there and I urge those who are watching this video, go check that out and gain some insight thereby. Quoting directly: "The notion that your banking is a private and confidential affair which is none of anybody else's business is rapidly becoming an anachronism" Well I tend to agree with that statement. That said, I tend to disagree with it happening; I think it's really wrong. 

Look I am sorry, I'll just be the person to say this. People do get to hide things; people do get to have some level of privacy. I am constantly reminded in the modern era in which we are living in, especially the social media era of the term "Glasnost". Everybody always remembers the term "Perestroika" as it pertained to the fall of the Soviet Union. That term pertained to the introduction of free enterprise into the Soviet system which many attribute to the fall of the Soviet system. But if you actually remember there was another program that was happening can concomitantly with that one and that was the notion of "Glasnost" which oftentimes I've seen Westerners translate that term to be "transparency". When I translate that term, or where I have seen it translated by folks that have some level of fluency in Russian, it has been translated as the word "publicity" which is a very different thing from "transparency". Publicity just means a lot of things are seen but transparency kind of implies a solution occurs. At the end of the day, this notion of publicity, this notion that you should, I mean that's the implied message that keeps getting sent when we are hearing about 'digital wallets' and 'banking' and 'know your customer' and 'money laundering' and all of this kind of stuff, it's you can't have any privacy in your financial transactions. That is the message being conveyed and I can't say how wrong that is and moreover, it's a bad business strategy; it's bad strategy for economics. If you want to encourage business, if you want to encourage economic activity in your jurisdiction and thereby increase your tax base, you want to have at least a basic level of financial privacy where people can transact their business outside of the ever-present scrutiny of a nanny-minder, ever present voracious tax gobbling state. I mean you don't really want that. I am not against taxation. I'm kind of an odd person insofar as I have what some would call sort of libertarian leanings. I don't view myself as a libertarian per se, although maybe I'm adjacent, I agree with a lot of what they're on about, but I do believe yeah you do need some taxes. We need some roads around here, we need some police, we need some basic services and yeah we need to pay some tax for that. That is what it is, I can sort of deal with that. 

That said, and the thing that take away from this video is look, at the end of the day, do we really want to live in a world where we have no financial privacy because that's the road we are on and frankly one of the things I loved about Thailand when I first got here was the fact that you do have financial freedom, well at least you used to have some substantial financial privacy when transacting your business. I think that was very conducive to a lively economy here in Thailand in a free enterprise sort of paradigm and I think that Thailand would be if you will, I do not think it would be in Thailand's best interest to stray too far away from that paradigm.