Russia responded to the threat of economic sanctions last week by moving more than $100 billion in Treasury bonds out of New York. “We hold a decent amount of Treasury bonds — more than $200 billion — and if the United States dares to freeze accounts of Russian businesses and citizens, we can no longer view America as a reliable partner,” Sergei Glazyev, an advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, told Baron’s. “We would find a way not just to reduce our dependency on the United States to zero but to emerge from those sanctions with great benefits for ourselves,” Glazyev said on March 4. He added the move to impose harsh sanctions on Russia would result in an economic crash in the West. “An attempt to announce sanctions would end in a crash for the financial system of the United States, which would cause the end of the domination of the United States in the global financial system,” he said. On March 10, Russia said it was preparing a bill that would freeze the assets of European and American companies operating in Russia if the West imposed sanctions. A large number of corporations would be impacted by the measure, including but hardly limited to PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Ford, Caterpillar, IBM, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, ExxonMobil, Chevorn, Boeing, ConocoPhillips, and many others doing business in Russia.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:21:07 +0000