RE:Optics vs Reality but majority of voters have poor memory so politicians will keep projecting optics.
Yes, in reality, sanctions don't work, Sanctions are for losers. Sanction does very little.
As of June 2021, countries or regions subject to U.S. sanctions (either unilaterally or in part) include the Balkans, Belarus, Burma, Burundi, Central African Republic, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Hong Kong, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Nicaragua, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Ukraine/Russia, Venezuela, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.
DId Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea smarten up under sanction?
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Experienced wrote: So far we have seen lots of press about the sanctions on Russia. The popular press makes it all sound like a devastating blow to the Russians when in actual fact the sanctions are by and large toothless tigers.
The latest one announced was the expulsion of Russia from SWIFT. But wait. We need to look at the fine print. Energy trade was excluded.
This begs the question - What else does Russia export that could be covered by these new sanctions?
The short answer is not much. So this latest measure will not have any significant effect on the Russian economy and certainly won't change Putin's mind.
Besides all this, Russia and China each have their own version of SWIFT, albeit, very small and less developed than SWIFT but it does provide an alternate channel for Russian goods to be sold and paid for. BUT the press will never tell you about that. Probably because they don't even know about it because it wasn't covered in the press releases by the US Government and the EU.
What us as investors need to address is the question of how the manipulators on Wall Street plan to play this next week given that most people don't have a clue about how international markets really work and how to figure out what is noise and what is really important. Whichever way the denizens of Wall Street decide to go, you can bet that their trading floors are going in the opposite direction. The trick is to go with what they are doing NOT what they are saying.
In my case, as mentioned before, I am overweighted cash, so if they take the market down, I will have to buy things on sale like them and if they decide to take the market up, I will sell and increase my cash position for when they decide to take the market down.
The reason I am so glib about all this is that since energy has been excluded from the SWIFT decision and SWIFT is last big thing the West can do, there is very little from a pure economics and finance point of view to change the economic situation from what it was before the invasion. This comment is not intended in any way to minimize the tragedy of the potential loss of life and dislocation of hundreds of thousands of people as a result of the stupidity of this war.