[pstation]

Correct.

You can open up an USD account in maybe Zambia and transfer funds to another USD account in Dubai without it ever touching the US financial system.

[ty6853]

Yet interestingly the USA could put you in jail for wire fraud for 20 years for doing so even if you never interacted with the USA or any US citizens or ever stepped foot on their territory.

[robocat]

The wire fraud laws seem like they are meant to catch everything?

The law seems to get used whenever the US wants to jail someone it doesn't like (but doesn't have a good reason)

[thresh]

Is that correct? My understanding is that the SWIFT transfer will go through a US correspondent bank in this case.

[sgjohnson]

Not necessarily. A correspondent bank is simply a bank where the recipient bank has an account in the specified currency. For domestic currencies used only in certain countries, that bank will almost always be in that country. For currencies used globally - not necessarily.