Yet on Feb. 26, the U.S. and its allies put aside fears over the potential hit to their own economies and moved to shut a group of Russian lenders out of the network. That left bankers and diplomats racing to grasp the repercussions for everything from energy exports to debt and currency markets.
Excluding
Russia from global banking’s SWIFT messaging system was always seen as
an extreme option to punish President Vladimir Putin for his actions in
Ukraine. Some were reluctant to impose it; France’s finance minister
called it “the financial SWIFT Spared From Russia Sanctions on Europe’s Energy Fears (1)" target="_blank">nuclear weapon.”
1. What is SWIFT?
SWIFT -- the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication -- is the Gmail of global banking.
It delivers secure messages among more than 11,000 financial
institutions and companies in over 200 countries and territories,
handling trillions of dollars in transactions. The message traffic -- 42
million a day on average last year -- includes orders and confirmations
for payments, trades and currency exchanges. A member-owned
cooperative, based just outside Brussels, SWIFT was founded in 1973 to
end reliance on the telex system.
2. Why is losing SWIFT access such a big deal?
A
country cut off from SWIFT can suffer significant economic pain. That’s
what happened to Iran in 2012, when its banks lost access as part of
European Union sanctions
targeting the country’s nuclear program and its sources of finance.
(Many of the banks were reconnected in 2016 after the EU took them off
its sanctions list.) When Western nations threatened Russia’s access to
SWIFT in 2014, Alexei Kudrin, a onetime finance minister close to Putin,
estimated that it could reduce Russia’s gross domestic product by 5% in a year.
3. Who’s been banned?
The
U.S. was working with European Union partners to finalize the list of
Russian banks to be cut off from SWIFT. It was set to include seven
lenders including state-controlled VTB, Bank Rossiya and Bank Otkritie, according to an EU SWIFT Ban Spare Key Russian Banks With Energy Ties" target="_blank">draft. Some of those targeted already faced other sanctions. Sberbank and Gazprombank
were excluded from the proposal, underscoring concern over the
potential economic fallout for Europe. Sberbank has twice as many assets
as any other bank in Russia and Gazprombank is a key bank for Russia’s
energy conglomerates...
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