U.S. stops Russian bond payments, raising risk of default
Source: Reuters
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON, April 5 (Reuters) - The United States stopped the Russian government on Monday from paying holders of its sovereign debt more than $600 million from reserves held at U.S. banks, in a move meant to ratchet up pressure on Moscow and eat into its holdings of dollars. Under sanctions put in place after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, foreign currency reserves held by the Russian central bank at U.S. financial institutions were frozen.
But the Treasury Department had been allowing the Russian government to use those funds to make coupon payments on dollar-denominated sovereign debt on a case-by-case basis. On Monday, as the largest of the payments came due, including a $552.4 million principal payment on a maturing bond, the U.S. government decided to cut off Moscow's access to the frozen funds, according to a U.S. Treasury spokesperson. An $84 million coupon payment was also due on Monday on a 2042 sovereign dollar bond.
The move was meant to force Moscow to make the difficult decision of whether it would use dollars that it has access to for payments on its debt or for other purposes, including supporting its war effort, the spokesperson said. Russia faces a historic default if it chooses to not do so. "Russia must choose between draining remaining valuable dollar reserves or new revenue coming in, or default," the spokesperson said.
JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), which had been processing payments as a correspondent bank so far, was stopped by the Treasury, a source familiar with the matter said. The correspondent bank processes the coupon payments from Russia, sending them to the payment agent to distribute to overseas bondholders. The country has a 30-day grace period to make the payment, the source said.
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/business/us-cracks-down-russian-debt-payments-latest-sovereign-payments-halted-2022-04-05/
= new reply since forum marked as read
By Selcuk Gokoluk and Srinivasan Sivabalan
February 25, 2022, 7:51 AM EST
BlackRock Inc., Capital Group Companies and Legal & General Group Plc are the top holders of Russia’s dollar bonds, which lost almost half their value this week, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, has about $1.5 billion of the $33 billion of bonds outstanding, according to the data. Capital Group and Legal & General are the second and third biggest investors, with holdings of $283 million and $272 million, respectively. The firms didn’t immediately comment on the data when contacted by email earlier today.
Russian dollar bonds were hammered this week on concern the invasion of Ukraine would incur sweeping sanctions that would severely limit Moscow’s ability to access financial markets, including restricting investors’ ability to trade Russian debt on the secondary market. They lost 45%, or $15 billion, of their market value, according a Bloomberg index that tracks 10 dollar bonds. The selloff on Thursday alone wiped out about $11 billion.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-25/blackrock-among-russia-bond-holders-tangled-in-15-billion-rout
(above color version of image in the Bloomberg article from here - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-25/blackrock-among-russia-bond-holders-tangled-in-15-billion-rout)
Then you have this - https://www.bloomberglinea.com/2022/03/15/russia-is-spiraling-toward-a-150-billion-default-nightmare/
I thought I had heard something about the biggest private equity companies here and was trying to remember in reference to what... but just now found where I heard it.
I was watching the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for confirmation of Judge Brown-Jackson yesterday, they had to go on break waiting for Sen. Padilla to get to D.C. after a flight delay, and in the meantime, the Senate had been gaveled into session and various Senators would appear to give "Morning Business" floor speeches including Bernie Sanders. His speech was to commend Amazon and Starbucks workers for bringing unions into some of their outlets, but in a portion of his speech, he made this remark -
According to the RAND Institute, since 1975, $50 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1% – primarily because corporate profits and CEO compensation has grown much faster than the wages of average workers.
And listen to this, which really says it all. During this terrible pandemic, when thousands of essential workers died, gave up their lives, doing their jobs, some 700 billionaires in America became nearly $2 trillion richer.
Today, multi-billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are off taking joy rides on rocket ships to outer space, buying $500 million super-yachts and living in mansions with 25 bathrooms.
And let’s be clear. It’s not just income and wealth inequality. It is economic and political power. In America today, just 3 Wall Street firms (Black Rock, State Street and Vanguard) control assets of over $21 trillion which is essentially the GDP of the United States, the largest economy on Earth. 3 Wall Street firms.
(snip)
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/prepared-remarks-sanders-floor-speech-on-growing-union-movement/
And I had never heard of "State Street".
I will forever cringe when I see "Alfa Bank" listed somewhere (shown in that 2nd graph). 
IOW a "tangled web", or better, a "rat's nest" of interconnections that have been woven over the decades that we are seeing revealed.
And I mean any money belonging to any Russian, plus we should do something to the
oligarchs with duel citizenship. Hit enough of them in the pocketbook might stop future wars.
