Can Putin Recover From This?The Fed and the European Central Bank move hard, fast, and together.By David FrumThe EU Commission announced this afternoon that the European Central Bank will deploy its most powerful financial weapon against Russian aggression. Several hours later, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the Federal Reserve will impose sanctions of its own upon the Russian central bank.
Central-bank sanctions are a weapon so devastating, in fact, that the only question is whether they might do more damage than Western governments might wish. They could potentially bankrupt the entire Russian banking system and push the ruble into worthlessness.
Russia is also being hit by a partial cut-off from the SWIFT system. SWIFT is a messaging technology based in Belgium that allows banks to talk to one another in secure ways, enabling the safe and sure electronic transmission of funds. SWIFT is not a bank, nor is it exactly a payments system. It is instead a way to guarantee that money moves where it is supposed to go. Countries cut off from SWIFT, as Iran was in 2012, are effectively cast back into the precomputer era—forced to rely on primitive barter transactions, or Breaking Bad–style pallets of physical cash, to fund their governments and their economies.
Details are still pending about the Western central-bank sanctions. To better understand the possibilities, I spoke with Michael Bernstam, an economist and Soviet-born analyst at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Bernstam has studied the potentially decisive impact of such sanctions since the prior Russian invasion of Ukraine, in 2014.
Bear with me as I walk you through some banking and currency technicalities. I promise the destination will be worth the trouble.
Suppose you are a Russian company that buys things from the outside world and sells them to Russians. You earn your income in rubles. You spend in euros, U.S. dollars, British pounds, Japanese yen, South Korean won, or possibly Chinese renminbi. How does that work, exactly?
Well, a Russian business or individual might convert the rubles earned inside Russia into foreign currency at a Russian bank. Or—because the ruble has a strong tendency to lose value against foreign currency—that Russian business or individual might set up an account at a Russian bank denominated in euros or dollars. Both of those are legal to do in postcommunist Russia.
Most of these conversions from rubles into foreign currency take the form of computer clicks that credit or debit the electronic ledgers of financial institutions. The deposit of rubles into a bank is a click. The sale of rubles for euros or dollars is another click. The arrival of the foreign currency into the Russian customer’s account is only one click more. Very seldom does any actual paper money change hands. There’s only about $12 billion of cash dollars and euros inside Russia, according to Bernstam’s research. Against that, the Russian private sector has foreign-currency claims on Russian banks equal to $65 billion, Bernstam told me. Russia’s state-owned companies have accumulated even larger claims on Russia’s foreign reserves.
Despite the relative scarcity of physical foreign currency inside Russia, all of these clicks can happen because Russians generally have confidence that their banks could pay foreign cash if they had to. If every Russian depositor—individual, corporate, state-owned—showed up at the same time to claim their dollars and euros, you’d have a classic bank run. But Russians don’t run on their banks, because they believe that in a real crunch, the Russian central bank would provide the needed cash. After all, the Russian central bank holds enormous quantities of reserves: $630 billion at the last tally before the start of the current war on Ukraine. In an emergency, the central bank would draw upon its reserves, provide cash to the commercial banks, and every depositor could be paid in full in the currency promised. With $630 billion in reserves, there is no way Russia would ever run out of foreign currency. You’ve probably read that assertion many times in the past few days. I actually wrote such an assertion myself in an article published last week.
Not so fast, argues Bernstam. What does it mean that Russia “has” X or Y in foreign reserves? Where do these reserves exist? The dollars, euros, and pounds owned by the Russian central bank—Russia may own them, but Russia does not control them. Almost all those hundreds of billions of Russian-owned assets are controlled by foreign central banks. Russia’s reserves exist as notations in the records of central banks in the West, especially the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve. Most of Russia’s reserves are literally IOUs to the Russian central bank from Western governments.
Remember the saying “If you owe the bank $10,000, you have a problem—but if you owe the bank $10 billion, the bank has a problem”? We, the people of the Western world, collectively owe the Russian state hundreds of billions of dollars. That’s not our problem. That’s Russia’s problem, an enormous one. Because one thing any debtor can do is … not pay when asked.
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Ik vond dit artikel wel interessant waarin uitgelegd wordt hoe de sancties tegen de centrale bank van Rusland werken, dat het voor hen economisch catastrofale gevolgen kan hebben en zelfs een te krachtig middel zou kunnen blijken.
“That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”― George Carlin