Feb
27
SWIFT & Ruble
The Russians are worried about Monday's fall of the ruble. Queues in front of ATMs are forming across the country on Sunday, Bloomberg reported. People want to withdraw money in foreign currency because they suspect that new sanctions against the Kremlin for invading Ukraine will lead to the collapse of their national currency.
New US and European sanctions in the form of disconnecting selected Russian banks from the SWIFT international banking system and freezing Russia's central bank reserves will have devastating effects on the Russian economy, analysts estimate. They expect the ruble to fall as soon as the markets open on Monday.
Russian banks that lose access to SWIFT will have difficulty communicating with trading partners internationally, including in friendly countries such as China, which will slow trade and significantly increase transaction costs.
According to some analysts, the second part of the new sanctions by the US and the EU will also be effective, namely the freezing of the Russian central bank's reserves, which could lead to the fall of the ruble, as the central bank will find it difficult to intervene.
"There will be a catastrophe in the Russian currency market on Monday. I think they will stop trading and then the exchange rate will be fixed at an artificial level as in Soviet times, "said Aleksashenko.
The Swift network consists of two operations centers. One is in Europe (Leiden) and the other in the USA (New York). The centers are interconnected and are used to store data for another center. The transfer of data and information realized through SWIFT is carried out through so-called swift messages, which are characterized by a high degree of standardization of form and content and the same language - English. Each swift message is always marked with the letters MT and three numeric characters - MT xyz, where x is the category of the message; y is a message group; z is the message type. A new set of financial reports in XML format has been developed in parallel, but their use is still voluntary, except for SEPA payments.
