– Russia and China Preparing Alternative Banking Architecture:
…no one of these stories is a silver bullet, but they’re all related and point in the same direction: China and Russia are preparing for the split with US-dominated financial architecture.
James Corbett | April 16, 2017
It may have arrived with little fanfare, but Russia’s SWIFT alternative has, more or less, arrived. Speaking in no uncertain terms at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin late last month, Elvira Nabiullina, the Governor of Russia’s central bank, stated: “We have finished working on our own payment system, and if something happens, all operations in SWIFT format will work inside the country. We have created an alternative.”
https://youtu.be/515wKNvH0pc
Now this news will be old news to intrepid Corbett Reporteers. My long-term audience will no doubt recall the September 21, 2014 episode of New World Next Week where James Evan Pilato and I covered the Russia/China talks to create both a SWIFT alternative and an independent ratings agency. You’ll also of course recall my March 11, 2015 editorial in these very pages where I discussed then-recent reports that China was ready to go live with its own SWIFT alternative, the Cross-Border Inter-Bank Payments System. For those not following along at home, that system did indeed go live in October of that year, but in a “watered down” form that only accounts for cross-border yuan trade deals, not capital-related transactions.
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