> See thats why one needs a sovereign financial and banking system.
You mean a sovereign financial and banking system like the one currently freezing some $200B of Russian assets? Yeah I think the EU already has one of those.
Doesn’t really matter does it? Belgium was a founding member of the EU, and still strongly supports it. There’s a reason why Belgium has been at the centre of the debate around frozen Russian assets, if they really didn’t care, they would just release the funds and wash their hands of the whole affair.
That is not how SWIFT works at all. SWIFT is basically a peer to peer financial network between banks. Any bank can send any amount of money to any other bank, without any kind of approval from the US, provided they have an appropriate common facility. Which could be anything from both banks having accounts at a different common bank, or both banks holding accounts at a common national bank, which allows them to transact directly.
Pretty sure I saw an article describing some approval process. While trying to find it I found references to FATCA, TFTP, and some reporting by the NYT
The US can and does sanction entities that facilitate transactions it doesn't like, by cutting them off from the dollar system. That may be the source of your confusion.
No, it was an article by a European economist who was complaining about every transaction above a certain amount getting quietly reviewed in the US, before being released to the onward bank.
This is the banking Secrecy Act which handles money laundering stuff. AFAIK, it should be the local regulator that sees any transaction reports, but maybe I'm missing something.
That’s probably related to transactions large enough to warrant immediate settlement via a US federal reserve bank. Given US federal reserve banks sit at the heart of US dollar transactions (pretty much by definition, they’re the only entities actually capable of creating US dollars), very large transactions that create significant flow imbalances between two banks trading US dollars anywhere in the world, will result in a settlement at a federal reserve.
But that only applies to transactions happening in US dollars, and SWIFT deals in far more than US dollars. For US dollar transactions it’s easy to imagine federal reserve banks slowing the settlement process and demanding extra data. Something that would be very annoying for foreign banks to deal with, but hardly unexpected. The US does ultimately control the US dollar after all, and at least for now the US dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, which naturally gives the US an outsized influence in world financial markets. But Trump also seems hell bent on testing that privilege to breaking point.
You mean a sovereign financial and banking system like the one currently freezing some $200B of Russian assets? Yeah I think the EU already has one of those.