Russian Sanctions: Questions and Answers

This post is authored jointly with our friend and colleague, Professor Richard Berner, Co-Director of the NYU Stern Volatility and Risk Institute.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is altering global security and economic relationships. In this post, we focus on the financial and trade sanctions imposed on Russia. These sanctions are the most powerful and costly punishments imposed on a major economy at least since the Cold War. Their speed, breadth and coordinated global support appear unprecedented.

Not surprisingly, the impact is immediately visible. The damage to the Russian economy and financial system includes, but is not limited to, a plunge of the ruble (by about 40 percent versus the dollar over the past month amid heightened volatility); runs on domestic banks; a sharp hike in the central bank’s policy rate; imposition of capital controls; shutdown of the Russian stock market; collapse in the value of Russian companies traded on foreign stock exchanges; removal of Russian equities from global indexes; and the collapse of Russia’s sovereign credit rating to junk status.

The purpose of this post is to pose and provisionally answer a series of questions raised by this new sanctions regime.…

Spillovers, spillbacks and policy coordination

Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan’s recent plea for increased coordination is merely the latest protest by emerging-market economy (EME) policymakers about the spillovers from advanced-economy (AE) monetary policy. Such complaints have been common since AE central banks first implemented unconventional policies in 2008. The most famous was Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega’s September 2010 remark that “We’re in the midst of an international currency war.”

The targets of these comments—policymakers in Europe, Japan and the United States—responded that the world would be better off if their economies grew. A deeper recession in the advanced world was surely in no one’s interest. Extraordinary monetary policy easing was therefore justified by both domestic and global concerns. U.S. and European policymakers further defended their actions by saying that their mandate was to promote price stability and sustainable growth domestically, which required taking account of the external impact of their policies only insofar as they then fed back onto their own economies. That is, while spillovers per se were not their responsibility, spillbacks were.

Debates over the potential benefits from international policy coordination have a long history...

Déjà vu in emerging markets

For decades a number of emerging markets have been evolving into advanced economies. They have improved their financial systems, property rights, policy frameworks, and growth models. As it turns out, however, the evolution was going the other way, too: advanced economies were becoming more like emerging markets, too. Debt was accumulating on household, corporate and bank balance sheets. Booms in real estate and parts of the corporate sector added to financial vulnerability. And policymakers were inattentive to the risks or lacked consensus on how to address them...

It's a small world (after all)

Originally built for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the “It’s a small world” exhibition re-opened at Disneyland two years later in 1966. At the time, the international monetary system was characterized by fixed exchange rates and widespread capital controls.

A half century later, global finance has been transformed so that exchange rates are now mostly flexible and cross-border capital mobility is generally high. As they say in Disneyland, it’s a small world after all...

Commentary

Money, Banking, and Financial Markets