Confiscating a major central bank’s reserves broke centuries of financial convention
Evidence
In retaliation to Putin’s aggression, the Federal Reserve froze hundreds of billions of dollars that belonged to Russia’s central bank but kept within the dollar-payment circuit that the US controls fully. It was the first time in capitalist history that a major central bank’s money had been, effectively, confiscated by another central bank. Even during the Crimean War of the 1850s, as Russian and British soldiers were slaughtering each other, the Bank of England continued to honour financial commitments to the Czar’s central bank and Russian debtors kept paying their loan instalments to English bankers. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 598
Categorization
- DEFINE: Establishes a concrete definitional baseline for what counts as extraordinary (vs ordinary) state interference in international payment systems.
- CANDY: The Crimean War detail — Bank of England honoring commitments to the Czar while soldiers killed each other — is a perfect dinner-party fact about financial convention outlasting armed conflict.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 598
- XREF: connects to: The Russian reserve seizure undermined trust in dollar-denominated assets — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 599
Broader Connections
- The Russian reserve seizure undermined trust in dollar-denominated assets
#expands(0.90) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 599