Russia’s Alternative to SWIFT Would Cause Big Problems for the West

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Russia’s Alternative to SWIFT Would Cause Big Problems for the West

It could be exploited by tax evaders and terrorists
A single global payments system allows for control against criminals – competing ones can be exploited by criminals on both sides
Ted Baumann (The Sovereign Investor)

The international financial system is based on the U.S. dollar. The greenback is both the world’s “reserve currency” — the one everyone wants to hold when things go bad — and the principal means of exchange. The vast majority of transactions between companies, countries and people are denominated in dollars.

As my investment-oriented colleagues regularly discuss on this page, the dollar’s dominance isn’t unchallenged. The Chinese yuan, in particular, has pretensions to become a second global currency, one so widely used that transactions unrelated to China could be conducted in yuan.

But there’s another challenge on the horizon … a new international interbank system that could create important opportunities — or chaos — for the world economy, depending on how the proverbial ball bounces.

Not So SWIFT

You probably know the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system as that little jumble of letters and numbers you need every time you send money to a foreign bank account.

It’s the global banking system’s address book and postal system. SWIFT has more than 10,000 members in more than 200 countries, and handles more than 15 million messages daily.

But even though SWIFT is based in Belgium, and subject to EU law, the U.S. government claims legal authority over all SWIFT transactions denominated in U.S. dollars — even if those dollars never enter a U.S. bank account — because they are ultimately “backstopped” by the Federal Reserve.

So when European banks used SWIFT to facilitate dollar-dominated transactions between Iran and third parties, the U.S. fined those banks billions of dollars for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, even though no money passed through the United States. They eventually got Iran kicked off the SWIFT system altogether.

The Inevitable Blowback of Russia’s New Interbank System

Iran isn’t in a position to challenge the United States. But when the U.S.’ most loyal ally in Europe, the United Kingdom, called for Russian banks to be ejected from SWIFT during the height of the Ukraine crisis, the two Anglo countries met their match……more here

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Russia’s Alternative to SWIFT Would Cause Big Problems for the West