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Comment by troon-lover | Hacker News Reader

This headline doesn’t make sense. Russia has more than $600B sitting in the same banks that control this debt.

Laugh out loud at the idea that the bank can say “you’re defaulting because i refuse to acknowledge a payment from your account”.

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If I get arrested for stealing a bunch of money from my neighbor and manage to put it into my local bank before I do, my bank might be justifiably concerned that I won't be able to make my mortgage after the police seize my stolen goods.

Possession is 9/10ths of the law.

Is it any more unfair that Russia can't access those reserves than that foreigners can't access their Russian assets?

As long as things are frozen, they are in the hands of whoever has physical custody. If things remain as they are then the whole world has given their Russian financial assets back to Russia for free, haven't they?

Russia is huge, they should have lots of things within their borders. Plus, those borders are expanding!

Freezing is slightly different to usurping.

Freezing is where your assets are still yours in name, but is unable to spend it. There may be conditions where it is unfrozen.

Usurping is when they no longer belong to you, and there's no recourse. I would be wary of normalising usurping assets by western Govts, rather than merely just freezing.

Why? It would create a very useful precedent.

The precedent would be that it’s ok for the government to usurp your assets if they choose to. I don’t think that’s a good precedent.

In response to a war or genocide. It’s a good precedent; it’s not that different from the usual economic sanctions.

i would be against usurpment - freezing is the most that should be allowed. Otherwise, it's too easy to justify theft, and next time it might not be some despotic dictator, but citizens.

So? It’s citizens’ responsibility to get rid of dictators. It’s also their shared responsibility for what their country is doing.

A weapon should not be judged on what the most good it could do, but on what the most evil it could accomplish.

It might look good on paper to do this to Russia, but I think it's the first domino on a path to widespread international kleptocracy.

I want to savor a comment by "antifa" warning that we are on a slippery slope to the breakdown of property rights worldwide.

You know what ELSE could be the first domino on a path to widespread international kleptocracy? Stealing whole countries with impunity.

Well not the first domino. One of the middle dominoes.

It doesn’t matter if you have money, it matters if you can pay.

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