The Russian reserve seizure undermined trust in dollar-denominated assets

Evidence

Try putting yourself in the shoes of Chinese capitalists, or China’s finance minister, whose savings are in the form of dollar assets worth trillions: US Treasury Bills (i.e. loans to the American government), real estate in California, shares and derivatives in the New York money markets. Everyone knew that the US government could confiscate the lot at any time, but no one believed Washington would ever dare to, because such a move would deter anyone from ever stashing their wealth within the US-controlled dollar payments system again. Then the inconceivable happened: four days after Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine, Washington seized more than $300 billion belonging to Russia’s central bank and evicted anyone transacting through Russia’s central bank from all international payment systems. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 599

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s platform-capitalism thesis: the US dollar payment system functions as a rent-extraction platform in its own right, and Washington just proved it can expropriate tenants at will. — connects to: Confiscating a major central bank’s reserves broke centuries of financial convention — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 598; The digital yuan lacked users until the dollar’s reliability was questioned — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 608
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 599