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In case a future Fed withholds needed bailout: a dollar coalition – Asia Times

In the event of dysfunction in dollar funding markets, the Federal Reserve can supply liquidity through standing central bank swaps. This column considers a scenario in which the Fed declines to extend such credit. It argues that 14 major central banks hold roughly $1.9 trillion in US safe assets. They could form a dollar coalition of the willing by pooling their dollar holdings and swapping them when needed. An inferior international lender of last resort beats no international lender of last resort.

On 16 April 2025, Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell (2025) assured Professor Raghu Rajan that the Fed stands ready to supply dollar liquidity through standing central bank swaps. 1  When needed, the Fed can lead international last resort lending of dollars by extending hundreds of billions of its credit to partner central banks that in turn lend to their banks against collateral. Powell stressed that in doing so, the Fed ensures the transmission of its own policy when global dollar funding markets dry up. He cited the example of a foreign bank funding a security backed by US household debts (Reis and Bahaj 2018).

In 2008 and 2020, the amounts that the Fed swapped were not small, but offshore dollar funding – both on- and off-balance-sheet – is measured in the tens of trillions of dollars. Thus, with pennies on the dollar lent and repaid with interest, the Fed and co-operating central banks calmed dollar panics.

In the light of events in early 2025, this column considers the unlikely possibility that the Fed does not take the lead in international dollar lending of last resort in the event of dysfunction in dollar funding markets. What if some future Fed leadership were to decline to extend its credit through central bank swaps, taking the view that they “just hate bailing out Europe again,” in the unguarded phrase of the US Vice President (Goldberg 2025)? Or to condition swaps on bilateral political considerations?

US Vice President JD Vance (center), discussing Trump administration plans to bomb Houthi rebels, said he disliked “bailing Europe out again.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (left) responded, “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s pathetic.” They assumed the world wasn’t listening but they were on a Signal chat and a magazine editor had been invited by mistake. (This picture shows an earlier public ceremony, in which Vance swore in Hegseth.) Photo: Wikipedia

This scenario is worth exploring even if one deems it very unlikely. A new Fed Board leadership would have to persuade the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to reverse the policy just affirmed by Chair Powell. By law, the FOMC controls Fed open market operations, including the central bank swaps. 2

A glance at the recent additions to the current FOMC lineup suggests that it would not readily agree to withhold standing central bank swaps for political reasons. On 21 April, the New York Fed appointed European Central Bank (ECB) operations veteran Anna Nordstrom to head its markets group, managing the FOMC’s $6.3 trillion System Open Market Account. Her crisis-tested predecessor, Lorie Logan, has headed the Dallas Fed since 2022. 3 Last year, another New York Fed veteran, Alberto Musalem, and a former Goldman Sachs global treasurer, Beth Hammack, became the heads of the St Louis and Cleveland Feds, respectively. By the wisdom of the Congressional framers of the Federal Reserve Act, none is a presidential appointee. 4

That said, after trans-Atlantic differences surfaced over NATO, Ukraine and trade in March 2025 5 but even before the so-called reciprocal tariff announcement in early April, the reliability of the Fed as a source of dollar swaps came into question (Smart 2025). On March 20, a think tank report to the European Parliament considered a scenario of politicized “recourse to the dollar swap lines” (Tudoir et al. 2025). More telling was a Reuters story on the same day, widely sourced by a large team of writers, that reported that European central bankers were discussing how to make do without the Fed swaps. 6 Citing the Reuters story, Deutsche Bank’s foreign exchange strategist George Saravelos (2025) called this a “nuclear button.” 7

This scenario takes us to the Kindleberger Trap, the risk that a fading world power lacks the ability, but the ascendant power lacks the will, to provide the world with vital public goods — such as stable international money. In 1931, the Bank of England (BoE) was not able, but the Fed was not willing, to serve as lender of last resort to Austria. As a result, the crisis rolled on to Germany, Britain and ultimately the US. The Kindleberger Trap caught the “world in depression,” as Charles Kindleberger (1973) titled his seminal work. 8 Nowadays, it is not, as Joseph Nye (2017) imagined, that the Fed is unable to play lender of last resort and the People’s Bank of China is unwilling.

Instead, the hazard to the world economy now is that:

  • 1. The Fed is able to lead a dollar lender of last resort operation, but
  • 2. A future Fed may not be willing to do so, and
  • 3. No one else is able to do so.

This column proposes a work-around:

  • 4. A coalition of central banks can pool dollars to lend as a last resort.

Central banks without access to the Fed could form a dollar coalition of the willing.9 The 14 central banks that had standing and temporary Fed swap lines in 2008 and 2020 span dollar funding markets to a remarkable extent, which is not generally recognized (Ito et al. 2021). Among them they cover about three-fourths of offshore dollar liabilities of non-US headquartered banks and about five-sixths of global turnover against the dollar in the foreign exchange swap market (Figures 1 and 2 from McCauley 2024).

Figure 1 Dollar liabilities of banks headquartered outside the US

Figure 1 Dollar liabilities of banks headquartered outside the US
Figure 1 Dollar liabilities of banks headquartered outside the US
Note: 1 Cross-border and local liabilities in all instruments vis-à-vis all counterparty countries. Excludes intragroup positions but includes liabilities to other (unaffiliated) banks. From end-2015, includes positions reported by China and Russia (the latter up to end-2021).
Sources: BIS consolidated banking statistics; BIS locational banking statistics; author’s calculations.

Figure 2 Coverage of dollar foreign exchange swap turnover by Fed central bank swaps in 2007-2022

Figure 2 Coverage of dollar foreign exchange swap turnover by Fed central bank swaps in 2007-2022
Figure 2 Coverage of dollar foreign exchange swap turnover by Fed central bank swaps in 2007-2022
Note: Big 5: European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, Bank of England, Bank of Canada, and Swiss National Bank, advanced economy (AE) 5: Reserve Bank of Australia, Riksbank, Norges Bank, Danmarks Nationalbank, Reserve Bank of New Zealand; emerging market (EM) 4: Monetary Authority of Singapore, Banco de Mexico, Bank of Korea, and Central Bank of Brazil.
Source: BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey of foreign exchange of 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2022, author’s estimates for Danish krone, author’s calculations.

A key fact is their collective firepower: The 14 central banks hold lots of dollars. Their collective holdings of US safe assets amounted to an estimated $1.9 trillion at the end of 2021. 10 The 14 central banks cannot, like the Fed, create dollars without limit, but they could pool their holdings and swap them when needed.

There is ample precedent for central banks to lend each other international money that is not of their own creation. In the 19th century, precious metal loans did not lack a geopolitical dimension but could not be unlimited.

A legendary story tells how the Silver Train (Silberzug) chugged from Vienna to Hamburg in 1857. Agreeing to a call for help on 8 December, the Bank of Austria loaded a train with almost ten million ounces of silver. 11   It arrived on 12 December “in highly visible fashion” (Deutsche Boerse 2025, Roberds and Velde 2014, p 45) in time to prevent the impending failure of most of Hamburg’s banks and to allow ship captains to unload their cargoes with some hope of getting paid (Aliber et al. 2023, pp 294-295). The Bank of Prussia evidently regretted having joined London and Paris in turning Hamburg down, before Vienna said yes – and having thus “missed an opportunity.” 12  

During the 1890 Baring Crisis, it took the Banque de France about a day to send 707,547 ounces of gold, worth £3 million, from Paris to London by wagon, train, and ship. 13 The crates of gold “supposedly” recrossed the channel unopened (Flandreau 1997) 14 but, in any case, signaled that sterling was as good as gold. The BoE Governor “and the City were uneasy about asking the French and the Russians for help…. Suppose for some political-financial reason they had been unwilling to oblige?” 15 These metallic last resort loans calmed panics even though neither drew on alchemy to extend unlimited support.

In the modern era, central bank mutual support has mixed money creation and dollar reserve use in varying proportions. In the record-breaking $3 billion support for the Bank of England in November 1964, the US, German, French and Swiss central banks pledged 59% in their own currencies and the other G-10 members and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) pledged 41% in dollars (Schenk 2010, p 276). The June 1976 record-breaking $5.3 billion credit to the Bank of England reversed the proportions, as apparently only the Fed pledged its own currency for 38% and the other G10 members and the BIS stumped up dollars for their 62% share. 16  

Thus, in an historical perspective, the 2008 pattern of the Fed, the ECB and the Swiss National Bank (SNB), each swapping its own currency, stands out as an exception. Much of last resort lending by central banks to each other has involved lending their own reserves rather than freshly created money.

With this perspective, the $1.9 trillion possible pool is big money. It’s triple the previous maximum drawing on the Fed swap lines in 2008 ($598 billion) and quadruple the peak 2020 usage ($449 billion) (Choi et al. 2022). The coalition would signal an independent judgement of the nature of the crisis, backed by money, like a Fed swap, as opposed to each central bank in need drawing only on its own resources. And if the Fed could trust the 14 central banks, how could they not trust each other?

Where the pool could fall short would be in signaling that there is plenty more where this came from. If the $1.9 trillion were deemed too small, coalition members could ex ante raise the dollar share of their reserves, reversing diversification into Canadian and Australian dollars, renminbi, and other currencies (Arslanalp et al. 2022). Or highly rated countries could borrow dollars ex ante to add to reserves at low cost. 17

Leadership could arise among the Fed’s standing swap partners – the ECB, Bank of Japan (BoJ), SNB, BoE, and Bank of Canada. The ECB and BoJ were the largest users of the Fed swap lines in 2008 and 2020, respectively. During the 2023 run on Credit Suisse, the SNB acquired unique experience in tapping the New York Fed for $60 billion against US Treasury collateral under the FIMA (foreign and international monetary authorities) repo facility (Martin 2024).

The coalition could enlist the BIS for technical support as an agent as European central banks did in 1973-95 (ECB 2025). Or the BIS could serve as intermediary, as it did when the New York Fed lent dollars through the BIS to offshore banks in the 1960s to prevent funding crunches (McCauley and Schenk 2020).

Using reserves rather than money creation to fund swaps has a snag: the $1.9 trillion is invested, and a crisis calls for electronic cash. If the Fed were to deny swaps, would it continue to provide same-day FIMA funding against Treasuries held in custody?

If it did, the coalition could arrange to access hundreds of billions of dollars in same-day funds to meet a panic. If the Fed did not, then it would end up providing ad hoc funding. Here is why.

Without the FIMA backstop, heavy central bank sales of US Treasuries would rock the US bond market. Such selling could prod the Fed into the market as buyer of last resort — as in March 2020, before the FIMA repo was introduced.

Without the FIMA backstop, central banks might seek to repo hundreds of billions in Treasuries for cash in the market. Such funding could well prod the Fed to cap market repo rates. After all, the recent benchmark rate shift from dollar LIBOR to repo-based SOFR means that the Fed’s own domestic monetary transmission requires well-behaved repo rates.

One way or another, the coalition would need to work with the Fed to manage any “dash for cash” (Barone et al. 2022).

Limits excite. It may well be, as Eurosystem sources grimly noted to Reuters, that “there is no good substitute to the Fed” (Martinuzzi et al. 2025). Even a large pool of dollar reserves would not stack up to “whatever it takes” Fed swaps, as demonstrated neatly in Korea during the 2008 Global Crisis (Baba and Shim 2014).

Nonetheless, a dollar coalition of the willing could pool trillions of dollars to backstop global dollar funding with no more than self-interested Fed help. An inferior lender of last resort beats no lender of last resort.

Robert N McCauley is a nonresident senior fellow of the Global Development Policy Center, Boston University, and an associate member of the Faculty of History, University Of Oxford.

This article was originally published by VoxEU, portal of the Center for European Policy Research. It is republished with permission.

References

Aliber, R, C Kindleberger and R McCauley (2023), Manias, panics and crashes, 8th edition, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Alito, S (2024), “Dissent to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau et al. v. Community Financial Services Association of America, Ltd., et al.”, Supreme Court of the United States, argued 3 October 2023 — Decided 16 May 2024.

Allison, G (2014), Destined for war, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Arslanalp, S, B Eichengreen and C Simpson-Bell (2022), “The stealth erosion of dollar dominance and the rise of nontraditional reserve currencies”, Journal of International Economics 138, 103656.

Baba, N and I Shim (2014), “Dislocations in the won-dollar swap markets during the crisis of 2007-2009”, International Journal of Finance and Economics 19(4): 279-302.

Barone, J, A Copeland, C Kavoussi, F M Keane and S Searls (2022), “The global dash for cash: why sovereign bond market functioning varied across jurisdictions in March 2020”, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, no 110, March.

Bordo, M D and A Schwartz (1999), “Under what circumstances, past and present, have international rescues of countries in financial distress been successful?”, Journal of International Money and Finance 18(4): 683-708.

Chinn, M and J Frankel (2007), “Will the euro eventually surpass the dollar as leading international reserve currency?”, in R Clarida (ed.), G7 current account imbalances: sustainability and adjustment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chinn, M, J Frankel and H Ito (2024), “The dollar versus the euro as international reserve currencies”, Journal of International Money and Finance 146, 103123.

Choi, M, L Goldberg, R Lerman and F Ravazzolo (2022), “The Fed’s central bank swap lines and FIMA Repo Facility”, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Economic Policy Review 28(1).

Deutsche Boerse (2025), “Die Weltwirtschaftskrise 1857”, accessed 24 April 2025.

European Central Bank (2025), “The European Monetary Cooperation Fund (1973-93)”.

Flandreau, M (1997), “Central bank cooperation in historical perspective: a skeptical view”, Economic History Review 50(4): 735-763.

Foulis, P (2015), “The sticky superpower”, Economist special report, 1 October.

Garcia-Herrero, A (2024), “BRICS is becoming a more solid construction”, Bruegel First Glance, 29 October.

Gislén, M, I Hansson and O Melander (2021), “Dollar liquidity from the Federal Reserve to other central banks”, Sverigis Riksbank Economic Review 1: 27-51.

Goldberg, J (2025), “The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans”, Atlantic, 24 March.

Hauser, A and L Logan (2022), “Market dysfunction and central bank tools: insights from a Markets Committee Working Group chaired by Andrew Hauser (Bank of England) and Lorie Logan (Federal Reserve Bank of New York)”, Markets Committee Papers, Basel: BIS, 11 May.

Ito, H, G K Pasricha and J Aizenman (2021), “Central bank swaps in the age of Covid-19”, VoxEU.org, 8 April.

Kamin, S and M Sobel (2024), “Dollar dominance is here to stay for the foreseeable future–the real issue for the global economy is how and why”, AEI Economics Working Paper 2024-02, January.

Kamin, S and M Sobel (2025), “Trump is undermining the dollar’s global financing and reserve role”, Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, 10 March.

Kindleberger, C (1973), World in depression, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Martin, A (2024), “Presentation to ‘Policy session 3: The US dollar in the international financial system’”, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Financial Markets Conference, 21 May.

Martinuzzi, E, J Aguado, B Koranyi, S Spezzati and J O’Donnel (2025), “Exclusive: some European officials weigh if they can rely on Fed for dollars under Trump”, Reuters, 24 March.

McCauley, R (2019), “Safe assets: made not just born”, BIS Working Paper no 769, February.

McCauley, R (2024), “The offshore dollar and US policy”, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Policy Hub, no 2-2024, May.

McCauley, R and C Schenk (2020), “Central bank swaps then and now: swaps and dollar liquidity in the 1960s”, BIS Working Papers no 851, April.

Mehrling, P (2022), Money and empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Menand, L (2021), “The Federal Reserve and the 2020 economic and financial crisis”, Stanford Journal of Law, Business & Finance 295: 101-166.

Menand, L (2022), The Fed unbound, New York: Columbia Global Reports.

Nogueira Batista, P (2023), “BRICS financial and monetary initiatives – the New Development Bank, the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, and a possible new currency”, Valdai Discussion Club Opinions, 3 October.

Nye, J (2017), “The Kindleberger trap”, Project Syndicate, 9 January.

Perry, A R (2020), “The Federal Reserve’s questionable legal basis for foreign central bank liquidity swaps”, Columbia Law Review 120(3): 729-767.

Powell, J (2025), “Fireside chat with Raghuram Rajam”, Economic Club of Chicago, 16 April.

Reis, R and S Bahaj (2018), “Central bank swap lines”, VoxEU.org, 25 September.

Roberds, W and F Velde (2014), “Early public banks”, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Working Paper no 2014-3, February.

Saravelos, G (2025), “A ‘nuclear button’ for the dollar”, Deutsche Bank FX Research, 27 March.

Schenk, C (2010), The decline of sterling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smart, C (2025), “Will Trump use the Federal Reserve for leverage, too?”, Foreign Policy, 14 March.

Todoir, S, S Vallee, O Reiter and R Stehrer (2025), “Europe’s policy options in the face of Trump’s global economic reordering”, Monetary Dialogue Papers, Economic Governance and EMU Scrutiny Unit, Directorate-General for Economy, Transformation and Industry, for the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, European Parliament, March.

Weiss, C (2022), “Geopolitics and the U.S. dollar’s future as a reserve currency”, Board of Governors International Finance Discussion Papers, no 1359, October.

Footnotes

  1. Powell (2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o_9kO0zZQg, at minute 35:50. Rajan’s question was poignant, since he had called attention to the Fed’s not extending a swap to the Reserve Bank of India when he was the Governor in 2013.
  2. The Fed claims the authority of Section 14 of the Federal Reserve Act to do swaps as open market operations. Perry (2000) and Menand (2021, 2022) have questioned this use of the Section 14 authority. To a non-lawyer, that the Congress has received 60 years of reports on the Fed’s foreign exchange operations, including the swaps, implies something like consent. But Menand (2021, p 108) quotes the Supreme Court in a different context: “[u]nlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law.” Perry (2020) predicted in early 2020: “If another crisis were to occur, public outrage might center on certain, legally dubious Fed activities, such as these swap lines.” In the event, there was little discussion of the 2020 swaps. Perry’s and Menand’s proposal that swaps be done under the Fed’s 13.3 authority would make the swaps subject to a Treasury veto, as required by the 2010 Dodd Frank Act’s amendment of 13.3. 
  3. See Hauser and Logan (2022).
  4. It is not certain whether the president has the legal authority to fire the Chair of the Federal Reserve Board without cause. Even if so, the former chair could remain as governor and be voted chair of the FOMC. In the 16 April interview, Chair Powell (2025) said that the Fed was carefully following the case of two labour board members fired by the president. The legal position of the Fed is different from many independent agencies in that the Congress has delegated to it monetary power that the Constitution clearly gives to the Congress. Justice Samuel Alito (2024), although a proponent of the unitary Executive, in a dissent against a ruling that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau can be funded by the Fed, set out the unique status of the Fed: “The Government also suggested that the Federal Reserve Board is a close historical analog for the CFPB…But that setup should not be seen as a model for other Government bodies. The [Fed] Board, which is funded by the earnings of the Federal Reserve Banks…is a unique institution with a unique historical background. It includes the creation and demise of the First and Second Banks of the United States, as well as the string of financial panics (in 1873, 1893, and 1907) that were widely attributed to the country’s lack of a national bank…. The structure adopted in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 represented an intensely-bargained compromise between two insistent and influential camps: those who wanted a largely private system, and those who favored a Government-controlled national bank. … For Appropriations Clause purposes, the funding of the Federal Reserve Board should be regarded as a special arrangement sanctioned by history.”
  5. Steve Kamin and Mark Sobel (2025), formerly senior officials of the Fed Board and US Treasury, respectively, wrote on 10 March that “Trump is undermining the dollar’s global financing and reserve role…The world is openly questioning whether the US is a reliable partner…” Compare to the authors’ “Dollar dominance is here to stay…” in January 2024.
  6. Martinuzzi et al. (2025): “Some European central banking and supervisory officials are questioning whether they can still rely on the U.S. Federal Reserve to provide dollar funding in times of market stress, six [!] people familiar with the matter said, casting some doubt over what has been a bedrock of financial stability. The sources told Reuters they consider it highly unlikely the Fed would not honour its funding backstops — and the U.S. central bank itself has given no signals to suggest that. But the European officials have held informal discussions about this possibility — which Reuters is reporting for the first time — because their trust in the United States government has been shaken by some of the Trump administration’s policies.”
  7. Saravelos (2025): “Ultimately, a withdrawal of the Fed as the international lender of last resort is equivalent to a suspension of the dollar’s role as the safest of global currencies. Doubts about a commitment from the Fed to maintain dollar liquidity — especially against [sic] major allies — would accelerate efforts by other countries to reduce their dependence on the US financial system. It would ultimately lead to lower foreign ownership of US assets and a broad-based weakening of the dollar’s role in the global financial system.” This is a very different scenario of dollar decline from that of Menzie Chinn and Jeffrey Frankel (2007), who imagined a shift from the dollar based on high US inflation. An update by Chinn et al. (2024) finds little role for inflation.
  8. The Kindleberger Trap, one of a vacuum of power, must be distinguished from the Thucydides Trap of Allison (2014), in which the dominant power fears the rising power and goes to war. See Mehrling (2022) for a discussion of Kindleberger’s global public goods that the leader (or ‘hegemon’) needs to provide to supply global financial stability.
  9. Ten years ago, the Economist’s Patrick Foulis (2015) argued that those central banks that were not included in the Fed’s swaps could pool their dollar reserves and thereby insure each other against a sudden need for dollars. Then and now, the undisputed key dollar reserve holder in this negatively defined group is China. Already in 2015, the odd gathering – a case of life imitating an investment bank strategist’s conceit — of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) – started down the road to a swap facility. They have not gotten very far. In the event, “BRICS is ending up as a hub and spoke model with China as the centre” (Garcia-Herrero 2024), but the swap arrangement is according to an insider ‘small’ and ‘frozen’ (Nogueira Batista 2023). This leaves China’s network of bilateral swaps as the real game, which Argentina has demonstrated can be tapped for dollars in extremis.
  10. The author thanks Colin Weiss (2022) for his estimates based on publicly available data, which are doubtless closer to the mark for aggregates like the 14 than for particular countries. For example, Weiss’s procedure overstates known UK dollar reserves, but understates known Swiss dollar reserves. The 14’s total foreign exchange reserves at the end of 2024 were about double the $1.9 trillion. Note that Weiss is working only with dollar reserves held in the US. McCauley (2019) estimates that $1 trillion in dollar reserves were held offshore in 2017.
  11. Oddly, the Bank of Austria was in a position to help owing to earlier fiscal dominance: “After years of unbalanced budgets and seigniorage finance, Austria was in a regime of inconvertible paper and fluctuating exchange rates, which partly insulated it from shocks on convertible countries: the specie reserve of the Bank of Austria was thus useless and could be profitably [at 6% interest] used in foreign support…” writes Flandreau (1997, p 750).
  12. The British consul in Hamburg noted that it was fortunate for Britain that Austria and not Prussia had brought the aid since there would then be no pressure on Hamburg to join the Zollverein.” Note that the borders of the German economy were at issue again in 1931, when the French demanded that Austria renounce a customs union with Germany as the price of another BIS-arranged credit from 11 central banks (Aliber et al. 2023, p 302). 
  13. It must have required five separate loadings (two in Paris, one in Calais, one in Dover, and one in London). Martin (2024) notes that central bank swaps are sometimes affected on the same day but often are T+1.
  14. Flandreau’s general scepticism about central bank cooperation as opposed to profitable central banking sits uneasily with his report on the parliamentary debate on the 1890 gold loan: “On the French side, the operation resulted in hostile interpellation in the chamber of deputies. But the minister of finance replied that such help had been necessary to prevent harmful repercussions for France of a deeper crisis in London.” Flandreau (1997, p 761) concludes, ”In all cases, international help had not resulted from a bilateral realization of common interests. In its most favourable form, it was a consequence of the unilateral perception of the possible gains associated with unilateral support.” In 2025, such enlightened self-interest would be most welcome. See also Bordo and Schwartz (1999), who rate the 1890 help by the Banque de France to the Bank of England a success. 
  15. Aliber et al. (2023, p 296), citing Clapham, the historian of the Bank of England.
  16. Schenk (2010, p 373-374) notes that drawings on the swap paid interest at the US Treasury bill rate, so the swap was presumably all in dollars. Dollar reserves had grown significantly since 1964.
  17. Or even at a profit. In the Global Crisis, the SNB sold dollar paper to fund its rescue of UBS. Where central banks do not have such power to borrow dollars, the government debt manager could borrow dollars and deposit them with the central bank; for top-rated sovereigns the cost of such borrowing net of the return on the reserves is close to zero. In Sweden the Swedish Debt Office borrowed dollars and euros after the GFC and the net cost given the returns earned by the Riksbank was close to zero. See Gislén et al. (2021, p 30) on ex ante versus ex post dollar borrowing.

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SWIFT battling Russia, China’s crypto use to dodge sanctions – Asia Times

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), the Western-led global financial transfer system, has implemented various control measures for banks to identify those who use cryptocurrencies to assist Russia and China bypass Western sanctions, including those imposed over the Ukraine war, according to a SWIFT executive.

“There is a number of different controls that are built into the system, and things that financial institutions and banks can use to manage and permit the traffic that happens over the SWIFT network,” SWIFT’s Chief Innovation Officer Tom Zschach told Asia Times in the Q&A session at a London cryptocurrency event on May 6.

“It’s a pretty mature infrastructure that we have in place. It’s all driven by our banks, around the agreements they have in place to transact with any of the counterparties around the world,” he said. “It’s pretty robust. It’s been in place for quite some time, and it helps to support things, even in the future, with some of the ideas we see rolling out around automatic compliance.”

Currently, SWIFT offers the Customer Security Programme (CSP) and the Customer Security Controls Framework (CSCF) to help financial institutions monitor suspicious or sanctions-dodging transactions.

Zschach’s said his primary responsibility is to drive innovation across SWIFT and collaborate with the SWIFT community and partners to prevent the fragmentation of international payment markets amid the rise of cryptocurrencies.

However, at the Digital Assets Summit organized by the Financial Times on May 6, media members were more interested in SWIFT’s efforts to prevent Russia and China from evading sanctions and moving to a different payment system.

Zschach did not name Russia and China specifically but stressed SWIFT’s increasing role in ensuring the world stays connected in today’s geopolitical situation.

“The geopolitics impacts many different areas, including payments,” he said. “We could build ‘digital islands’ and start to create different networks that aren’t connected. But nobody wins from the fragmentation.”

“In the US, there’s a pullback from globalization…. Now, SWIFT plays an even more important role in ensuring the world stays connected and that we don’t lose the trust and the ability to scale.”

Tom Zschach says SWIFT wants to ensure the world stays connected in cross-border payments. Photo: Asia Times / Jeff Pao

His comments came after Reuters reported in March that Russia has used cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, ether and stablecoins such as Tether (USDT) to effectively bypass Western sanctions in its estimated US$192 billion oil trade with China and India.

Stablecoins are digital assets that use blockchain technology to peg to the US dollar. They allow “T+0” or same-day settlement for cross-border transactions, while a traditional wire transfer can take up to five working days.

Traditional cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have a limited supply and high volatility as they are made through time-consuming and heavy electricity-using “mining” activities. Stablecoins have an unlimited supply as long as they are backed by dollars.

Crypto trading, which does not involve the SWIFT system, creates an environment for money laundering, cybercrime, and sanctions evasions. Crypto exchanges and related banks are responsible for “knowing your customer” (KYC).

The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) often sanctions companies and bourses in Russia, North Korea and Venezuela for suspicious crypto activities.

Sanctions against Russia

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the US, European Union (EU), United Kingdom (UK) and Canada agreed to punitively purge seven Russian banks from the SWIFT system.

China had once settled trade transactions with Russia in renminbi but the US deterred that workaround with secondary sanctions.

Russia and China then settled their transactions in more complex, harder-to-decipher ways. For example, Russians bought Chinese electronic parts and paid in gold, precious metals or gemstones, which were sold to the Middle East for US dollars. Hong Kong is both a logistics and financial hub for such operations.  

Last year, the US Treasury curbed these activities by sanctioning a group of Hong Kong and Chinese companies and threatened to sanction some small Chinese banks. 

The Wall Street Journal reported in April last year that intermediaries and smugglers have turned to using Tether to buy weapons and equipment for Russia’s defense industry. Some quoted in the article estimated this “shadow trade” at $10 billion a month.

Last September, Russia reportedly opened two crypto exchanges in Moscow and St Petersburg to support external trade.

“Could crypto eventually provide a ‘workaround’ to sanctions enforcement and prohibitions on terrorist financing?” researchers at the Washington-based Brookings Institution weighed in a report last year. “The fundraising techniques of those seeking to evade sanctions and prohibitions could easily become more sophisticated.”

The report said stablecoins could also become a way for terrorists to launder funds.

Crypto bourses in Asia

On January 23, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order encouraging the growth and use of digital assets, blockchain technology and related technologies across all sectors of the US economy.

Steve Lee, co-founder of Neoclassic Capital, says Asian countries are building their crypto exchanges. Photo: Asia Times, Jeff Pao

Steve Lee, co-founder of Neoclassic Capital, said at the Digital Assets Summit that many Asian countries are quickly building new crypto exchanges.

“Japan has been very progressive regarding crypto regulations since 2017. They are now aiming to lower the tax rate on crypto gains from 55% to 20%,” Lee said. “In South Korea, institutions might be able to start trading cryptos by the end of this year.”

“Singapore is easing its regulations to attract global crypto players, such as Robinhood Crypto (a US-based bitcoin trading platform),” he added. 

It remains unclear whether these Asian crypto exchanges will become new platforms for Russian and Chinese companies to circumvent US sanctions.

In a crypto roadmap unveiled last November, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority outlined its policy publications for regulating stablecoins, crypto firms, and exchanges. It will finalize the rules in 2026. 

Multinational law firm Pinsent Masons said in March that crypto companies have begun self-reporting suspected breaches of sanctions against Russia to the UK government. Three out of 50 self-reports originated from crypto firms, while others were from financial institutions.

Read: US warns Chinese banks over Russian shipments

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Trump on a precipice as markets write dollar’s eulogy – Asia Times

Tokyo – The most recent speech for the US dollars reads like a book. As Donald Trump’s White House decouples the US from a worldwide business structure it dominates, the money is taking the brunt of the consequences.

This has caused the stockpile stock’s obituary to receive a lot of international investors. The four most perilous finance terms, this day one that is unique, may apply as the Trump 2.0 president struggles against economic weight.

The US president has made no secret of his hatred for an independent central banks, simple clarity or nasty norms like never defaulting on federal debt. The issue is less whether the economy’s time as the best safe sanctuary are over. It’s what information or events investors may be keeping an eye out for that could bring down the money.

They include Trump’s active with the Federal Reserve, the death of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whether the trade conflict intensifies and how US-China conflicts shake out.

The currency’s approximately 10 % decline year-to-date has been fairly orderly, despite how terrifying it has been. In subsequent trading sessions, it has stabilized as Trump appeared to be easing up his tax arms race. The harm to the money is good done, though.

The head of foreign exchange at Goldman Sachs, Kamakshya Trivedi, claims that the US dollar’s failure is still present. It will continue and it will grow deeper. I think the dollar failure has more to work”.

According to Jonas Goltermann, an economist at Capital Economics, Trump’s price move has led to “what appears to be a general decline in trust in the US as a safe haven in money and relationship markets.”

Paul Singer, the leader of Elliott Investment Management, was quoted by Bloomberg as saying that the money may reduce its reserve currency reputation as a result of rising trade tensions in a recent speech at a personal event in Abu Dhabi.

Still others argue the economy’s declines aren’t as alarming as some think. The dollar’s “longstanding overvaluation is beginning to depreciate,” according to Samuel Zief, head of global FX strategy at JP Morgan Private Bank. This could cause a 10 % –20 % decline in comparison to major peers like the euro and the Japanese yen over the medium term. We don’t interpret this as a penny money decline, but rather as a reset.

Zief adds that” we don’t believe investors want to revamp their resource allocations, and the United States remains a useful base positioning. However, recent market activity teaches us that over-reliance on any single market can be dangerous. In a changing environment, intentional diversification across regions and currencies is crucial.

Trivedi is paying particular attention to the ways in which the BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa— and other Global South nations are diversifying away from the dollar. Trivedi notes that in the near future, “it’s going to be the euro or the yen in the lead.” That’s your typical ultra-safe haven.

On the yen, Trivedi adds,” I think that we could be getting back to the low 130s in quick time if the labor market data in the US start to crack” .&nbsp, That would be a startling move considering dollar-yen is at 142 now.

What all this means for the so-called “yen-carry&nbsp, trade” is one risk factor. Japan became the most important creditor after twenty-six years of zero rates.

Over time, investors got into the habit of borrowing cheaply in&nbsp, yen &nbsp, to fund bets on higher-yielding assets everywhere. From South African commodities to Indian real estate, derivatives on New York exchanges, and cryptocurrency, this strategy has kept everything afloat.

The recent yen surge could cause markets all over the world to pull the floor out of the sky. When the&nbsp, yen &nbsp, zigs sharply, markets have long tended to zag. The BOJ’s decision to increase rates to their highest level since 2008 shook the world’s markets on July 31st, 2024. The BOJ increased rates a second time to 0.5 % in January, which was a second increase.

Arif Husain, head of fixed income at T Rowe Price, speaks for many when he calls the&nbsp, yen-carry&nbsp, trade&nbsp, the” San Andreas fault of finance”. However, where the Trump White House takes US policy next is the real wildcard for foreign exchange markets.

What happens to the Jerome Powell-style target Trump placed on the Fed Chair? Unhappy that Powell warned US tariffs might cause stagnation, Trump posted on social media that the Fed leader’s “termination&nbsp, cannot come fast enough”.

Trump’s threats to fire Powell shook the world’s markets. None of the US’s leaders had ever publicly demanded subservience, despite the fact that they frequently jawboned Fed policymakers at times. A simultaneous plunge in stocks and bond prices had Trump toning down his rhetoric.

Yet Krishna Guha, an economist for Evercore ISI, describes the episode as” self-defeating.” Guha claims that Trump “risks putting upward pressure on inflation expectations, making it harder for the Fed to cut rates,” by publicly undermining Powell.

Even so, few buy Trump’s insistence last week that he has” no intention of firing” Powell. After all, Trump said in the next breath that he wants the Powell Fed to be “little more active” in easing policy.

According to Linh Tran, analyst at&nbsp, broker XS.com, the dollar is currently being governed by” three core drivers”: a belief the Fed will soon ease, uncertainty over US-China trade tensions, and geopolitical risks, “especially as peace efforts between Russia and Ukraine remain stalled.”

The spoiler could be Trump ratcheting up tensions againg with Powell. Or Bessent, who has been cast in Peter Navarro‘s “bad cop” as Washington mixes it up with Beijing. Co-author of the book” Death By… China,” trade advisor Navarro has been calling for a bigger trade war and a more ferme stance toward the Fed.

Bessent, who’s considered less MAGA-ish than all other Trump cabinet picks, has been a relative voice of reason and calm on tariffs. It was Bessent who, according to the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, pulled Trump back from the brink, for the time being.

However, many people worry that the Navarro camp will reaffirm itself. News reports on how Trump “blinked” or” caved” on tariffs probably aren’t going down well in Trump World. Trump is also susceptible to being caught in an ostensible lie about whether the US is currently negotiating with China on trade. Trump asserts that yes, while Beijing asserts that no.

Bessent has been caught in the middle in ways that could make the former hedge fund manager’s ability to stay in MAGA World difficult. Bessent was the one who had to discredit Trump’s claims that Xi Jinping and his top negotiators called him frequently.

China claims that no calls have been made. Bessent was also sent out to attempt to explain what Trump really meant when he claimed,” I’ve made 200 deals” with American trading partners.

The Treasury Secretary is also the authority on preventing another bear market collapse. Bessent assisted Trump earlier this month in avoiding a catastrophe as the so-called “bond vigilantes” rebelled against tariffs, which appeared to be a surefire way to stagflation. The debt market chaos raised questions about whether Asian central banks might dump their US Treasuries.

According to Meghan Swiber, US rates director at Bank of America,” Japan and China, two of the biggest holders of]treasuries], have been reducing their demand in recent years.” ” Over the long term, tariffs and the possibility of a US trade deficit may cause foreign selling pressures.” However, foreign investors are unlikely the only seller driving recent price action”.

Trump’s emphasis on tax cuts, which comes at a time when the US national debt is approaching US$ 37 trillion, poses a significant challenge for Bessent to master. The way that Bessent’s team won’t necessarily have the benefit of the doubt with traders suggests how the$ 140 trillion global bond market literally screamed at Trump’s chaos in Washington.

The same goes for Washington’s fiscal trajectory. European credit rating company Scope is ringing the alarm despite the eerily quiet US ratings agencies. The head of sovereign ratings at Scope, Alvise Lennkh-Yunus, warns that Trump’s tariffs could cause a critical mass of global investors to turn to “viable alternatives” to the dollar as the main currency.

” If doubts about the exceptional status of the dollar were to increase, this would be very credit negative for the US”, Lennkh-Yunus says.

Washington is currently rated AA by Berlin-based Scope, which is significantly lower than Moody’s Investors Service’s current AA rating for S&amp, P Global, and Fitch Ratings.

If China and the European Union strengthen their trade ties, Lennkh-Yunus predicts that the dollar’s status will suddenly become more uncertain. The same could happen if Xi accelerates steps to reform and open China’s economy. Another significant risk is if nations with significant trade surpluses and US financial exposure become accustomed to Trump’s antics for the time being.

Even so, it’s hard to see a ready replacement. The recent record-breaking rally in gold shows that neither the euro, the yen, nor the Chinese yuan are prepared to plunder up trillions of dollars looking for a new home.

According to Steven Kamin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank,” Our bottom line is that there is no viable alternative to the dollar’s global dominance for the foreseeable future, but that Trump’s actions may accelerate a&nbsp, secular decline in dollar dominance&nbsp, and in the process exacerbate financial market volatility.”

In his previous work with Mark Sobel, US chair of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum ( OMFIF), Kamin highlighted three key considerations with respect to upholding future dollar dominance: preserving the underpinnings of the dollar’s global role, maintaining trust in the US as a reliable partner, and avoiding overuse or abuse of financial sanctions.

Trump is “flipping many properties that underpin dollar dominance,” Kamin claims. Trump plans to lower taxes despite the fact that America’s fiscal trajectory is already unsustainable.

Trouble is, he notes, “already excessive debt and deficits are well poised to go higher. Team Trump has made reference to taxes or levies on capital inflows for those who might avoid the dollar.

Despite Trump’s claims that they disagree, China has not shown any urgency to join him at the table. As Guo Jiakun, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, told reporters:” I want to reiterate that China and the United States are not engaged in consultations or negotiations on the tariff issue”.

Only Trump and perhaps Navarro can say whether a “grand bargain” trade agreement with Beijing is still a possibility. Trump is negotiating trade agreements with Japan and South Korea in a fake-it-until-you-make-it fashion in the interim. Tokyo and Seoul are also saying no deals are imminent, despite contrary suggestions from Trump World.

However, as Trump hammers away at all the reasons why the dollar continues to be at the center of the global financial community, its safe haven status is now seriously in jeopardy. Trump is incentivising global investors to find them sooner rather than later, despite the lack of ready alternatives.

Follow William Pesek on X at @WilliamPesek

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US readies huge tariffs on solar cells from Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia | FinanceAsia

In a further escalation of the US trade war, the US Department of Commerce has placed antidumping duties ( AD ) and countervailing duties ( CVD ) on crystalline photovoltaic cells ( solar cells ) arriving into the US from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, according to an April 21 announcement.  

¬ Capitol Media Limited. All rights reserved.

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Trade war has caught Wall Street between a rock and a hard place – Asia Times

The trade war between China and the US has spiraled into uncharted territory. On April 10, the Trump administration imposed a tariff of 125% on all Chinese imports. China called the actions unfair and responded with similar measures.

Within the broader debate around unravelling economic ties between the US and China, where economic interdependence has increasingly been viewed as a threat to US national security, this escalation raises questions about whether global finance is also reducing its presence in China.

After all, the risks of financial connectivity with China have been discussed prominently by US policymakers in recent years. And many financial analysts have spent much of the past year discussing whether China has become “uninvestable” due to rising geopolitical tensions.

However, as I show in a recently published study, most global financial firms have continued to expand their presence in Chinese markets over the last decade, even as tensions have intensified.

Crucially, they have done so on China’s terms, operating within a system that prioritizes government oversight and policy goals over liberal market norms. This pragmatic accommodation is quietly reshaping the global financial order.

China’s capital markets, which have historically been sealed off from the rest of the world, have been opening up in recent decades. This has prompted global financial firms to expand their footprint in China.

Investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have taken full ownership of local joint ventures. And asset managers like BlackRock or Invesco have established fund management operations on the Chinese mainland.

Yet China has not liberalized in the way many in the west expected. Rather than conforming to global norms of open, lightly regulated markets, China’s financial system remains largely guided by the state.

Markets there operate within a framework shaped by the policy priorities of the central government, capital controls remain in place, and foreign firms are expected to play by a different set of rules than they would in New York or London.

Foreign investors have been allowed to buy into mainland markets, but through infrastructure that limits capital outflows and preserves regulatory oversight.

Rather than adapting China to the global financial order, Wall Street has accommodated China’s distinct model. The motivation behind this is clear: China is simply too big to ignore.

Take China’s pension system as an example. Whereas pension assets in the US amount to 136.2% of GDP in 2019, in China these only amounted to 1.6%. The growth potential in this market is enormous, representing a trillion-dollar opportunity for global firms.

Consequently, index providers such as MSCI, FTSE Russell, and S&P Dow Jones – key gatekeepers of global investment – have included Chinese stocks and bonds in major benchmark indices.

These decisions, taken between 2017 and 2020, effectively declared Chinese markets “investment grade” for institutional investors around the world. This has helped legitimize China’s market model within the architecture of global finance.

America strikes back

In recent years, Washington has sought to curtail US financial exposure to China through a growing set of measures. These include investment restrictions, entity blacklists, and forced delisting for Chinese firms on US stock exchanges. Such actions signal a broader effort to use finance as a tool of strategic leverage.

The moves have had some effect. Some US institutional investors and pension funds have declared China “uninvestable” and are reducing their exposure. American investments in China have roughly halved since their US$1.4 trillion peak in 2020.

But attributing this solely to geopolitical pressure overlooks another key factor: China’s underwhelming market performance. A protracted property crisis, a government crackdown on tech companies and a weak post-pandemic economic recovery have made Chinese markets less attractive to investors in purely financial terms.

More strategically oriented investors from Asia, Europe and the Middle East have invested more into Chinese markets, filling gaps left by US investors. Sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East, especially, have engaged in more long-term investments as part of broader efforts to strengthen economic cooperation with China.

And at the same time, many Western financial firms have doubled down on their presence in China, expanding their onshore footprint. Since 2020, institutions such as JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock have opened new offices, increased their staff, acquired new licences and bought out their joint venture partners to operate independently as investment banks, asset managers or futures brokers.

It has become more difficult to invest foreign capital in China. But Western financial firms are positioning themselves to tap into China’s huge domestic capital pools and capture its long-term growth opportunities – even as they tread carefully around geopolitical sensitivities.

Fragmenting financial order

It is too early to predict the long-term effects of the current geopolitical tensions. But Wall Street is trying to placate both sides. On the one hand, it is adapting to capital markets with Chinese characteristics. And on the other, it is trying not to antagonize an increasingly interventionist America.

However, while holding its breath amid further escalation and having scaled back some of its activities, Wall Street has not left China. It is instead learning how to work within the constraints of a system shaped by a different set of priorities.

This does not necessarily signal a new global consensus. But it does suggest that the liberal financial order, once defined by Anglo-American norms, is becoming more pluralistic. China’s rise is showing that alternative models – in which the state retains a strong hand in markets – can coexist with, and even shape, global finance.

As tensions between the US and China continue to rise, financial firms are learning to navigate a world in which existing relationships between states and markets are being reconfigured. This process may well define the future of global finance.

Johannes Petry is CSGR research fellow at the University of Warwick.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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A psychopath wouldn’t hesitate to trigger global financial crisis – Asia Times

Would you want a psychopath looking after your pension? Or what about your shares? In a recent talk at the Cambridge Festival of Science, I spoke about the latest research relating to a psychopath’s love of money, greed for power and willingness to harm other people financially for personal gain.

Since I began researching corporate psychopaths and the global financial crisis, the idea of the financial psychopath, an employee in the financial sector acting ruthlessly, recklessly, greedily and selfishly with other people’s money, has gained traction.

The theory won support because psychopaths are more commonly found in financial services than in other sectors. It has even been argued that up to 10% of employees in financial services could be psychopathic. That is to say they have no empathy, care for other people, conscience or regrets for any damage they do.

These traits make them ruthless in pursuit of their own agendas and entirely focused on self-promotion and self-advancement.

But my ongoing research goes even further. It has found that psychopaths are willing to knowingly cause financial harm to the entire global community in order to receive a financial bonus for themselves. Personal greed outweighs the immense social and community costs of implementing that greed.

This aligns with earlier perceptions of some captains of finance or leading politicians as psychopaths. Previous research found that their selfish philosophy of life and their trivializing of other people free them from the restraints of being evenhanded, truthful or generous.

This new research also shows that a majority of psychopaths would even be willing to cause a global financial crisis – if they personally would profit from, for example, falling stock prices. This willingness holds true even when they could be personally identified as being the source of the crisis. Only a tiny minority of non-psychopaths would be willing to do this.

Race to the top

Financial insiders appear to agree with the assumption that psychopaths have always been prevalent in the sector. Many psychologists and other management commentators have come to the same conclusion.

Researchers have also found that interpersonal-affective psychopathic traits – such as deceitfulness, superficial charm and a lack of remorse – were associated with success in the finance sector.

Employees at financial institutions in New York scored significantly higher on these traits than people in the wider community. They also had significantly lower levels of emotional intelligence (as would be expected of psychopaths).

What’s more, having psychopathic traits has also been linked to higher annual incomes – as well as a higher rank within the corporation.

In other words, it looks like the more psychopathic an employee is, the farther up the corporate finance ladder they will go. This corresponds with findings that show there are more psychopaths at the tops of organizations than at the bottom.

Creating destruction

This is not to say that personal success in climbing the corporate ladder equates to professional success when someone reaches the top job. Quite the opposite. In fact, my research has shown that psychopathic leadership is associated with organizational destruction.

This includes a greater propensity to take risks with other people’s money, a greater willingness to gamble with someone else’s money and lower returns for shareholders.

In one study over a ten-year period, psychopathic fund managers were found to generate annual returns that were 30% lower than their less psychopathic peers.

The research team concluded that among elite financial investors, psychopathy and its appearance of personal dominance and competence may enable people to rise to the top of their profession. But this does not translate into improved financial performance at the organizational level, where the presence of the psychopathic is actually counterproductive.

Fraud has always been associated with the psychopathic – so much so that in one study 69% of auditors believed they had encountered corporate psychopaths in relation to their investigations.

Years ago, one bank reportedly used a psychopathy measure to recruit staff. But I would advise against hiring people who score very highly, because they are totally concerned with personal success. They are not bothered about long-term organizational growth or sustainability. As such, decisions will be made to suit the psychopathic worker and not the organization.

For example, new hires would be likely to be people who can help the psychopath achieve their personal aims and objectives rather than aid the company. Anyone astute enough to potentially be a challenge to the psychopathic employee would not be hired in the first place.

Without exception, psychopathic people love money and they are more motivated by it than other people are.

Unlike the rest of the population, psychopaths are uninterested in higher values, such as close emotional connections with family and friends, and much more focused on money and materialism. Seen through this lens the appeal, to people with these traits, of the corporate banking sector and the salaries and bonuses it offers soon becomes clear.

Clive Roland Boddy is deputy head of the School of Management, Anglia Ruskin University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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FinanceAsia Awards 2025: Southeast Asia winners announced | FinanceAsia

As the world is still yet out of the tariff woods, leading financial institutions across Asia Pacific (Apac) continue to navigate the uncertain tides and have made waves in the uncertain time. In the meantime, It was another challenging year for institutions in Asia as the global economy continues to recover after the Covid-19 pandemic, with sluggish economic growth. 

It is worth pausing to celebrate people, teams and organisations that have withstood the test of another challenging, if not difficult, year. Not only does geopolitcal complexity persist, each market is on their unique mission towards recovery, sustainability, digitalisation, restructuring, or innovation. 

The FinanceAsia team invited banks, brokers, ratings agencies and other financial institutions, to showcase their capabilities when supporting their clients. Our awards process celebrates those institutions that showed determination to deliver desirable outcomes, through the display of commercial and technical acumen.

 This year marks the 29th iteration of our FinanceAsia awards and celebrates activity that took place during the 12 months of 2024. 

Read on for details of the winners and finalists (entrants whose submissions were ((Highly commended by our jury) for North Asia. Full write-ups explaining the rationale behind winner selection will be published the Awards edition of FinanceAsia, with subsequent syndication online.

Congratulations to all of our winners in the Southeast Asian (SEA) markets: 

BRUNEI DOMESTIC

 

BEST BANK

 

Baiduri Bank

 

INDONESIA DOMESTIC

 

BEST BANK

 

PT Bank Mandiri (Persero) Tbk

 

Highly commended – Bank BRI

 

BEST BANK FOR FINANCIAL INCLUSION

 

Bank BRI

 

BEST BROKER

 

PT CGS International Sekuritas Indonesia

 

BEST COMMERCIAL BANK – SMES

 

Bank BRI

 

BEST CORPORATE BANK – LARGE CORP & MNCS

 

PT Bank Mandiri (Persero) Tbk

 

BEST CUSTODIAN BANK

 

Bank BRI

 

Highly commended – PT Bank Mandiri (Persero) Tbk

 

BEST DCM HOUSE

 

PT Indo Premier Sekuritas

 

BEST ESG CONSULTANT

 

UMBRA – Strategic Legal Solutions

 

BEST LAW FIRM

 

UMBRA – Strategic Legal Solutions

 

BEST PRIVATE BANK

 

Bank BRI

 

BEST RETAIL BANK

 

PT Bank Mandiri (Persero) Tbk

 

BEST STRATEGIC INITIATIVE – BANKS

 

PT Bank Mandiri (Persero) Tbk

 

Highly commended – PT Bank Syariah Indonesia Tbk

 

BEST SUSTAINABLE BANK

 

PT Bank Mandiri (Persero) Tbk

 

BIGGEST SUSTAINABLE IMPACT – BANKS

 

PT Bank Mandiri (Persero) Tbk

 

MOST DEI PROGRESSIVE – BANKS

 

 PT Bank Mandiri (Persero) Tbk

 

MOST INNOVATIVE USE OF TECHNOLOGY – BANKS

 

PT Bank Mandiri (Persero) Tbk

 

Highly commended – Bank Saqu

 

INDONESIA INTERNATIONAL

 

BEST BANK

 

BNP Paribas

 

BEST COMMERCIAL BANK – SMES

 

OCBC

 

BEST DCM HOUSE

 

DBS Bank

 

BEST ECM HOUSE

 

UBS

 

BEST INVESTMENT BANK

 

Deutsche Bank

 

Highly commended – UBS

 

BEST M&A HOUSE

 

 UBS

 

BEST SUSTAINABLE BANK

 

DBS Bank

 

BIGGEST SUSTAINABLE IMPACT – NONBANK FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

 

Credit Guarantee and Investment Facility (CGIF)

 

MALAYSIA DOMESTIC

 

BEST BROKER

 

CGS International Securities Malaysia

 

BEST COMMERCIAL BANK – SMES

 

Alliance Bank Malaysia

 

BEST CORPORATE BANK – LARGE CORP & MNCS

 

Maybank

 

BEST DCM HOUSE

 

CIMB

 

Highly commended – Maybank Investment Bank

 

BEST ECM HOUSE

 

CIMB

 

BEST INVESTMENT BANK

 

CIMB

 

BEST M&A HOUSE

 

CIMB

 

BEST SUSTAINABLE BANK

 

 Maybank Investment Bank

 

BIGGEST SUSTAINABLE IMPACT – NONBANK FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

 

AmInvest

 

MOST INNOVATIVE USE OF TECHNOLOGY – BANKS

 

Kenanga Investment Bank Berhad

 

MALAYSIA INTERNATIONAL

 

BEST BANK

 

 UOB Malaysia

 

BEST COMMERCIAL BANK – SMES

 

OCBC

 

BEST M&A HOUSE

 

UBS

 

BEST SUSTAINABLE BANK

 

UOB Malaysia

 

MYANMAR DOMESTIC

 

MOST INNOVATIVE USE OF TECHNOLOGY – BANKS

 

KBZ Bank

 

PHILIPPINES DOMESTIC

 

BEST BANK

 

BDO Unibank

 

Highly commended – Bank of the Philippine Islands

 

BEST BANK FOR FINANCIAL INCLUSION

 

BPI Foundation, Inc.

 

BEST BROKER

 

First Metro Securities Brokerage Corporation

 

BEST COMMERCIAL BANK – SMES

 

Security Bank Corporation

 

BEST CORPORATE BANK – LARGE CORP & MNCS

 

Bank of the Philippine Islands

 

BEST DCM HOUSE

 

First Metro Investment Corporation

 

BEST ECM HOUSE

 

BPI Capital Corporation

 

BEST INVESTMENT BANK

 

 BPI Capital Corporation

 

Highly commended – Security Bank Capital Investment Corporation

 

BEST RETAIL BANK

 

 Bank of the Philippine Islands

 

BEST SUSTAINABLE BANK

 

Bank of the Philippine Islands

 

BIGGEST SUSTAINABLE IMPACT – BANKS

 

Bank of the Philippine Islands

 

PHILIPPINES INTERNATIONAL

 

BEST BANK

 

HSBC

 

BEST BANK FOR PUBLIC SECTOR CLIENTS

 

Citibank N.A

.

BEST CORPORATE BANK – LARGE CORP & MNCS

 

 Citibank N.A.

 

BEST CORRESPONDENT BANK

 

 Citibank N.A.

 

BEST CUSTODIAN BANK

 

HSBC

 

BEST DCM HOUSE

 

UBS

 

BEST ECM HOUSE

 

UBS

 

BEST INVESTMENT BANK

 

UBS

 

BEST M&A HOUSE

 

UBS

 

BEST STRATEGIC INITIATIVE – NONBANK FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

 

 FinVolution Group

 

SINGAPORE DOMESTIC

 

BEST BANK

 

 United Overseas Bank

 

BEST BROKER

 

 Maybank Securities Singapore (MSSG)

 

BEST COMMERCIAL BANK – SMES

 

OCBC

 

BEST DCM HOUSE

 

United Overseas Bank Limited

 

BEST ECM HOUSE

 

DBS Bank

 

BEST INVESTMENT BANK

 

DBS Bank

 

BEST LAW FIRM

 

Allen & Gledhill

 

BEST M&A HOUSE

 

United Overseas Bank Limited

 

BEST SUSTAINABLE BANK

 

DBS Bank

 

MOST INNOVATIVE USE OF TECHNOLOGY – BANKS

 

OCBC

 

MOST INNOVATIVE USE OF TECHNOLOGY – NONBANK FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

 

UOB Asset Management

 

SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL

 

BEST BANK

 

 Citi Singapore

 

BEST DCM HOUSE

 

 UBS

 

BEST INVESTMENT BANK

 

Citi Singapore

 

BEST M&A HOUSE

 

 UBS

 

BEST SUSTAINABLE BANK

 

ANZ

 

MOST DEI PROGRESSIVE – NONBANK FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

 

Aberdeen Investments

 

MOST INNOVATIVE USE OF TECHNOLOGY – BANKS

 

 CIMB Singapore

 

MOST INNOVATIVE USE OF TECHNOLOGY – NONBANK FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

 

 Aberdeen Investments

 

Highly commended – Marex Solutions

 

THAILAND DOMESTIC

 

BEST BROKER

 

CGS International Securities Thailand

 

BEST DCM HOUSE

 

KASIKORNBANK PUBLIC COMPANY LIMITED

 

BEST ECM HOUSE

 

Kiatnakin Phatra Securities Public Company Limited

 

BEST INVESTMENT BANK

 

Kiatnakin Phatra Securities Public Company Limited

 

BEST LAW FIRM

 

Weerawong, Chinnavat and Partners

 

BEST M&A HOUSE

 

Kiatnakin Phatra Securities Public Company Limited

 

BEST SUSTAINABLE BANK

 

Bangkok Bank PCL

 

THAILAND INTERNATIONAL

 

BEST BANK

 

HSBC Thailand

 

BEST ECM HOUSE

 

 UBS

 

Highly commended – Maybank Investment Bank

 

BEST INVESTMENT BANK

 

UBS

 

BEST M&A HOUSE

 

UBS

 

BEST SUSTAINABLE BANK

 

UOB Thailand

 

BIGGEST SUSTAINABLE IMPACT – BANKS

 

UOB Thailand

 

VIETNAM DOMESTIC

 

BEST BANK

 

Vietnam Technological and Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Techcombank)

 

Highly commended – Asia Commercial Bank

 

BEST BANK FOR PUBLIC SECTOR CLIENTS

 

Saigon-Hanoi Commercial Joint Stock Bank (SHB)

 

BEST BROKER

 

SSI Securities Corporation

 

BEST DCM HOUSE

 

SSI Securities Corporation

 

BEST INVESTMENT BANK

 

SSI Securities Corporation

 

BEST LAW FIRM

 

YKVN LLC

 

BEST SUSTAINABLE BANK

 

Vietnam Technological and Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Techcombank)

 

Highly commended – OCB

 

MOST INNOVATIVE USE OF TECHNOLOGY – NONBANK FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

 

Techcom Securities Joint Stock Company

 

VIETNAM INTERNATIONAL

 

BEST BANK

 

HSBC

 

BEST COMMERCIAL BANK – SMES

 

Citi Vietnam

 

BEST CORPORATE BANK – LARGE CORP & MNCS

 

Citi Vietnam

 

BEST DCM HOUSE

 

HSBC

 

BEST ECM HOUSE

 

 HSBC

 

Highly commended – UBS

 

BEST INVESTMENT BANK

 

UBS

 

BEST M&A HOUSE

 

UBS

 

BEST SUSTAINABLE BANK

 

Citi Vietnam

 

BIGGEST SUSTAINABLE IMPACT – BANKS

 

HSBC

 

BIGGEST SUSTAINABLE IMPACT – NONBANK FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

 

Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG)

 

MOST INNOVATIVE USE OF TECHNOLOGY – BANKS

 

HSBC

 


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