Excluding Russia from Swift, the circulatory system of international commercial transactions, and therefore from the global circuit of bank payments, would be devastating for Moscow but also for the countries that trade with Russia.
An acronym for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, Swift is a secure, universally accepted messaging system, which today is the standard for quickly closing payments for goods, services, raw materials, energy products. Orders, currency exchanges, sales and purchases pass through there, with over 11,000 participating companies and financial institutions, a presence in over 200 countries and a traffic of 42 million messages per day.
The cooperative society to which it belongs was founded in 1973 and is based in Brussels: if you decide to cut off Moscow, you need an established EU sanction, which is then implemented by the Belgian central bank that supervises Swift together with representatives of the Federal Reserve System, ECB , Bank of Japan and others. There are already two precedents: Iran in 2012 (where Swift's board decided the measure under pressure from the US and not the EU) and Venezuela.
What would be the effects on Moscow's trading partners? Italian and French banks and German exports are highly exposed. But at the center of it all is energy: transactions with Russia would be frozen in which the West, buying gas and oil from Moscow at the rate of 700 million dollars a day, is still financing the invasion of Russia. 'Ukraine.
The West is also afraid that Russia and with it China may develop alternative systems: the Bank of Russia has already tried in 2014, however, collecting just 400 members. A candidate "platform" would be digital currencies (such as the yuan which Beijing works) and the crypto-assets that Western central banks are trying to counter.
(Unioneonline / D)