Friday, March 4, 2022

SWIFT Banishment Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

Eurointelligence, a site associated with Harvard and the Financial Times, reports that banning Russia from SWIFT has been far from complete.

There is no direct link for this story. Instead, go to the main webpage, and scroll down to March 3. The FAZ it refers to is a German newspaper.

The story is that a list went out of banks whose relationships with SWIFT were to be shut down. But then individual EU states complained about individual banks that were tightly entwined with their country, and they were removed from the list.

The post uses an acronym for this that you should start to become familiar with: SINO, short for Sanction In Name Only.

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The same post does not that Putin apparently did not expect Russian central bank to be cut off from western markets. Phew. At least something might work.

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And today there was news that they might want to kick Russia out of the IMF. This would block some of Russia's available funding. But there are political problems with this move. 

Also, the article does not mention one salient economic point: bigger and richer member countries pay dues to the IMF. So kicking them out and keeping their dues would reasonably be argued as much more akin to theft than other actions.

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