For months the disconnection of Russia it has been defined by the international payment system SWIFT as the mother of all sanctions, a financial “nuclear bomb”. But it is with freezing of the foreign exchange reserves of the Russian Central Bank that the West has hit Moscow where it hurts most.
Since 2014, Russia has in fact implemented economic policies aimed at increase the size of these reserves and to make them less dependent on the dollar. This has gone from 509 billion in 2014, of which 40% was in dollars, ai 630 billion current of which only 16% is in US currency.
Moscow’s goal was to be able to rely on sufficient funds to support the ruble in case of difficulty and on liquidity with which to help your banking system. As he did between 2014 and 2015 when faced with Western sanctions due to the annexation of the Crimea, the Russian Central Bank was forced to use 170 billion dollars from its international currency reserves, which thus fell by 32%.
The new package of measures decided by the US, EU and Japan expressly limits this possibility. Not only the Central Bank is prevented from selling its reserves in dollars, euros or yen, equal to 54% of its total reserves. But reserves that are not in these three currencies but which are also blocked are also blocked filed with the countries that have applied the sanctions, a percentage again close to 50%. And so the Bank of Russia had to resort to other monetary instruments.
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