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> A question: does Switzerland have any prior precedent of actions like this? I thought they were neutral? They aren't that neutral. > Close cooperation has a

by sva_ 5y ago

> A question: does Switzerland have any prior precedent of actions like this? I thought they were neutral? They aren't that neutral. > Close cooperation has also been established in the area of international sanctions. As of 2006, Switzerland has adopted five EU sanctions that were instituted outside of the United Nations. Those affected the former Republic of Yugoslavia (1998), Myanmar (2000), Zimbabwe (2002), Uzbekistan (2006) and Belarus (2006). [0] There were many more since. > de-dollarization in China I'm not sure how you mean this (which side), but I think a de-dollarization in China would be terrible. Countries will still rely on their manufacturing etc, so sanctioning them out of SWIFT would probably just weaken SWIFT, since it'd encourage them to have their own system (since it must exist by necessity of the world's dependence on Chinese stuff). These sort of sanctions only work because there's just a small fraction/party being excluded, I think. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_Union_relations#Foreign_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_U...

kaycebasques 5y ago
By faster de-dollarization I meant that China may speed up their work to voluntarily depend less on the dollar. It sounds like you might have interpreted me as meaning that other countries would sanction China out of being able to use the dollar. That's not what I was intending.
noxer 5y ago
They are! Neutral as in "does not participate in armed conflicts between other states". People just have a huge misconception of what the "neutrality" in "Swiss neutrality" really means. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30494956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30494956
yufeng66 5y ago
De-dollarization won’t happen in China. Chinese government is addicted to economic growth. The legitimacy of the government depends on it. There are only 3 ways to generate growth: infrastructure investment, consumption and export. The investment approach generates too much debt and one can argue China has reached limit there. Chinese has never been able to increase the consumption as a percentage of GDP in a meaningful way. So they have to rely on export. There is no way they can grow export without dollar.

by sva_ 5y ago

kaycebasques 5y ago

By faster de-dollarization I meant that China may speed up their work to voluntarily depend less on the dollar. It sounds like you might have interpreted me as meaning that other countries would sanction China out of being able to use the dollar. That's not what I was intending.

noxer 5y ago

They are! Neutral as in "does not participate in armed conflicts between other states". People just have a huge misconception of what the "neutrality" in "Swiss neutrality" really means. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30494956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30494956

yufeng66 5y ago

De-dollarization won’t happen in China. Chinese government is addicted to economic growth. The legitimacy of the government depends on it. There are only 3 ways to generate growth: infrastructure investment, consumption and export. The investment approach generates too much debt and one can argue China has reached limit there. Chinese has never been able to increase the consumption as a percentage of GDP in a meaningful way. So they have to rely on export. There is no way they can grow export without dollar.