Subject: Re: Putin's running clock
If they yank more of Russia's banks out of SWIFT, it means a lot for the Russian economy.

Not so much. That gun's already been fired. They've blocked nearly all of the important banks of SWIFT with the first round of exclusions, and when they finally added Sberbank and Gazprombank to the list that pretty much ended Russia's participation in SWIFT. The total number of Russian/Belarusian banks excluded from SWIFT is now up to 45. There's really no more material Russian banks to "yank out." Russia's basically out SWIFT entirely.

Russia responded by developing their own substitutes SWIFT, now relying almost entirely on their own SPFS system and participating in China's CIPS - which China created to reduce their reliance on SWIFT for international transactions. One of the real risks to the West's hegemony in international trade is if those two systems and India's new UPI system end up integrating into a functional alternative to SWIFT. It will be interesting to see whether India ends up deciding to join either CIPS or SPFS - they've been reluctant to formally do so until this point, because they knew how badly that would be received in the US and EU.