A Primer on SWIFT & Sanctions

Welcome to the 498 new members of the curiosity tribe who have joined us since Friday. Join the 72,546 others who are receiving high-signal, curiosity-inducing content every single week.Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Rows!After spending 7+ years in traditional finance, I had Chronic Excel Fatigue–the result of countless hours spent wrestling with the dated, legacy technology that hasn’t been updated since 2006!Fortunately, I discovered Rows—spreadsheets, reimagined. Rows is a truly magical product experience. It allows you to seamlessly pull data on stocks, crypto and more, and instantly integrate with services like Stripe, Google Analytics, Twitter, Salesforce, Instagram, Facebook and public databases like Crunchbase and LinkedIn.Rows is one of the most insane new product experiences I have had in recent memory. I use Rows for everything from managing my Startup Portfolio, social analytics, fund investing, and LPs to tracking household budgets and personal finance. I may never open Excel again.For your next spreadsheet, give Rows a try. You won’t be disappointed. Join thousands of teams that have stepped up their spreadsheet game with Rows.Today at a Glance:Economic sanctions fall into the category of economic statecraft—the use of financial levers to drive desired geopolitical outcomes. They can be broadly defined as any planned commercial or financial penalties applied by one or more countries on another country, group, organization, or individual.The goals of the sanctions include constraining cross-border money flows that are necessary for financing a long-term war effort, punishing the oligarchs who support Putin and his war efforts, depleting Russia’s financial reserves, and creating political unrest within Russia that puts Putin under pressure.While the base package of sanctions was considered standard, the weekend announcements of a cutoff from SWIFT and a Central Bank reserve freeze is potentially much more damaging to Russia and Putin.A Primer on SWIFT & Sanctions“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” — Vladimir LeninThe world is in a dramatically different state since you last received a deep-dive piece from me just one week ago. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has tragically plunged countless lives into chaos and encouragingly rallied much of the world to support the besieged Ukrainians. In the vein of support, I will be donating the proceeds from today’s newsletter to UNICEF: Protect Children in Ukraine.The situation is an intensely complicated one. There are two wars being waged here: a military war and an economic war.Today, I’d like to talk about that economic war and provide a simple breakdown of the most important weapons involved. I hope this piece makes you feel more well-informed in the days and weeks ahead.A Brief History of SanctionsEconomic sanctions have become a staple of modern statecraft.Economic sanctions fall into the category of economic statecraft—the use of financial levers to drive desired geopolitical outcomes. They can be broadly defined as any planned commercial or financial penalties applied by one or more countries on another country, group, organization, or individual.They are not new.Most historians agree that the first formal economic sanctions were in 432 B.C., when Athens restricted merchants from a rival city-state called Megara from participating in its marketplaces. The action choked off economic activity in Megara—the sanctions were highly-effective.Fast forward several millennia to World War I and economic sanctions had become a core tool in the geopolitical toolkit. A prolonged naval blockade by the Allies was used to restrict the flow of goods to Germany and the other Central Powers.As the 20th century progressed, sanctions were used time and again—the industrial logic was that their potential dire impact on an economy would cause would-be aggressors to think twice before taking military action.Unfortunately, this didn’t take into account the human impact of the collateral damage of these sanctions, which was often devastating.In the post-9/11 world, the increased awareness of this human impact gave rise to so-called “targeted” sanctions—sanctions specifically designed to mitigate collateral damage and have precise impact. If general sanctions had been a shotgun blast historically, targeted sanctions were designed to be a sniper shot.This is largely where we are today and how we got here. The U.S. and Western world continue to make heavy use of sanctions due to broad global reliance on the dollar for trade and commerce.With that history in mind, let’s turn to our present situation…The Russia SanctionsOver the weeks preceding Russia’s formal invasion of Ukraine, as its military aspirations became increasingly well-understood, the U.S. and Western world began preparing its financial response.There are several interconnected goals of the sanctions package here:Constrain cross-border money flows that are n...