Systemic Asymmetry and Hydraulic Capture

ABSTRACT & INTRODUCTION Global financial governance under the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is nominally framed as an institutional defense against money laundering, terrorist financing, and tax evasion. However, when analyzed through a thermodynamic fluid-dynamic framework, these regulatory regimes operate as an asymmetric compliance tariff. This paper demonstrates that FATF/OECD mandates impose crushing overhead compliance costs on Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and Global South economies, effectively choking local transactional velocity