Mastercard blocks Russian firms; bitcoin rises after latest sanctions on Russia – business live | Business

During [recent] years, I got to know several senior technocrats in the policy world, primarily from the central bank and finance ministry, and leading economic influencers, and I was often struck by how widely the belief was about Putin’s excellence as a strategist.

I had for some years been expecting some great era of big reforms to be unleashed due to these views but alas, they never came, and instead, this game of playing on his perception of western weakness dominated his apparent strategic thinking.

Well, after the weekend just passed, and the western financial sanctions announced, it seems to me that Putin isn’t such a great strategist after all.

I don’t know where the idea of freezing the central bank’s foreign exchange reserves originated, but whoever thought of it has come up with a cracker, alongside the bold move by leading western nations to agree to remove key Russian banks from the Swift plumbing network of the financial system.