Posted on 04/05/2022 10:22:44 AM PDT by marcusmaximus
The United States stopped the Russian government on Monday from paying holders of its sovereign debt more than $600 million from reserves held at U.S. banks, in a move meant to ratchet up pressure on Moscow and eat into its holdings of dollars.
Under sanctions put in place after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, foreign currency reserves held by the Russian central bank at U.S. financial institutions were frozen.
But the Treasury Department had been allowing the Russian government to use those funds to make coupon payments on dollar-denominated sovereign debt on a case-by-case basis.
On Monday, as the largest of the payments came due, including a $552.4 million principal payment on a maturing bond, the U.S. government decided to cut off Moscow's access to the frozen funds, according to a U.S. Treasury spokesperson.
An $84 million coupon payment was also due on Monday on a 2042 sovereign dollar bond .
The move was meant to force Moscow to make the difficult decision of whether it would use dollars that it has access to for payments on its debt or for other purposes, including supporting its war effort, the spokesperson said.
Russia faces a historic default if it chooses to not do so.
"Russia must choose between draining remaining valuable dollar reserves or new revenue coming in, or default," the spokesperson said.
JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), which had been processing payments as a correspondent bank so far, was stopped by the Treasury, a source familiar with the matter said.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Brought to you by the government that said tenants didn’t have to pay their landlords.
You are mostly correct. However Putin is old and worn out. Eliminating him and his corrupt cronies makes the world a safer place.
It’s called opportunity and it is knocking on the door
Treasury would have kept on granting the dollar debt payment exceptions but KGB Putin effed things up again by encouraging his monkeys to execute civilians and rape children in Bucha and the other villages.
KGB Putin is not a smart man.
It really doesn’t. But from the Politicians point of view. Their source of dirty money has to be protected. From the viewpoint of the Globalists, Fauchi and Company, including American hater George Soros Their bio labs which create, cultivate, and distribute deadly virus and pathogens World wide including the United States. Well they have to be protected also. And who is better to protect the Politicians source of dirty money, the human traffickers, along with Fauci and Company’s bio labs than American men and women. Plus, to the Politicians , war is profitable. There is millions of graft dollars, if not billions should the war last long enough to divide. They are willing and able to fight to the last peon as long as none of their relatives are involved in the dying. The Neo Cons? They are just doing everything to provoke a full scale nuclear with Russia. Why? Because in their minds, in their remote shelters, they have convinced themselves that they can survive a nuclear war. And when it is over, they can wed with the Globalists and rule the survivors.
The foreign holders of Russian debt will consider that a "default," but it's hard to make that case when the powers that control the currency of payment deliberately shut off avenues to use it for debt payment.
It's like a bank refusing to accept your mortgage payment that is being made by a personal check drafted from an account at the same bank. At this point the borrower no longer has any legal or moral obligation to pay back the debt.
By acting in this way, this country is hastening the end of the dollar as the international reserve currency. It wasn’t bad enough that Canada used its financial system as a political weapon against a bunch of truck drivers and those who donated to their cause - that severely damaged the credibility of the Canadian (and, by implication, the entire Western) banking system as an impartial utility providing financial services to all comers. No, now we’ve upped the ante to include an entire country (a nuclear superpower, no less) that provides huge amounts of food and fuel to much of the world, and effectively stole about $600 billion. Our system now has NO credibility as a neutral financial utility - so why should anyone trust us anymore? What, in the absence of that credibility/neutrality, keeps other countries from banding together and forming a new or competing international reserve currency? Make no mistake, the minute that the dollar is not the one and only international reserve currency is the minute when we lose 50% or more of our purchasing power, the minute at which we no longer can export our inflation and the moment in which a Great Depression will start here. We are ASKING for it.
Do you understand that they issued the payment order, but Biden is blocking it? Joe Biden is preventing Russia from using its own funds to meet its obligations and trying to insist that they use “other” funds, that it also owns. Biden has stolen 300+ billion dollars from Russia. There is no excuse for this. I don’t care who they invaded.
Speaking of the war with Japan, how many Freepers know this little tidbit of exactly how we rounded up Japanese Americans:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/
Imagine—the Census Bureau in 1940 knocked on their doors and told them that their address and other information were totally confidential.
Then...oops....
Btw there was never one whistleblower on this—not one Census Bureau employee or manager or other government official...
Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you it is impossible for conspiracies to exist because secrets cannot be kept.
But—don’t worry—this could never happen again...
Never....
Never....
Until it does.
Say what you want, the Russians have a very long history of paying their debts on time. It’s why banks were so willing to loan money to Russia; they knew they’d get paid back on time; ALWAYS.
” However Putin is old and worn out. Eliminating him and his corrupt cronies makes the world a safer place.”
In the history of the world, a crashed economy doesn’t give rise to better leaders and more freedom. It leads to despots, and war.
Our depression gave us FDR and the new deal. Weimar Germany gave rise to Hitler. If you remove this Putin government, someone radical will rise who comes in the door _knowing_ that the west is a deadly enemy who brought financial devastation to them. You will be wishing for the good old days of Putin.
Only neocon idiots imagine that deliberately visiting economic devastation on Russia will result in the rise of someone friendly to DC and the WEF.
If history has taught us anything, it's that one baddie always rises up to replace the last baddie.
The US Biden Administration has gone mad.
The Powers That Be behind the puppet are determined to start a war with Russia.
And they don’t care if the dollar gets destroyed when every country fed up with the unilateral dollar bludgeon bail en-mass. Our internal communist enemies WANT the dollar destroyed, to usher in their Globalist Electronic-Money-Only schemes.
It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
Boy, are you right and not a single Interventionist seems to understand the ramifications you outlined.
That’s a meaningless gesture to declare “default” on media. Anything but default in real life.
Seems the West wants WWII, a destruction of the economy, and to push through the great reset.
“Perhaps a more likely scenario is that he’ll make bond payments in rubles, not dollars.”
Astute. And say you are holding a bunch of Rubles that have been now pegged to gold in Russia. You going to toss them in the trash? Or find that they will suffice as a payment?
Getting sporty out there.
I think you’re right, the longer this goes on and USA keeps slapping sanctions on Russia, the calculation will be, if we default what is the downside for Russia versus the USA..
The Russian Debt is probably held by Western Banks and Governments and is insured with Credit Default Swaps.
If Russia Defaults will the USA officially confiscate Russian Assets to make the banks whole, will they allow the Credit Default Swaps to payoff and what will the result of that be.
In the end who will get hurt worse, Russia or the people holding their debts, at this point I’m not sure
“Theft and Piracy by the US Government.”
Biden is well known as a mean, vindictive, ill tempered man. He’s pissed at their Ukraine schemes getting stopped and exposed. So he’s striking out. He doesn’t care if the US, or anyone else, gets hurt.
Kinda reminds me of what we did to Japan before WWII.🙄
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.