Lawmaker Concerned Heavy Use of Sanctions Could Hurt The Dollar
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., speaking at an American Compass event this week on Capitol Hill, said he's worried that the pervasiveness of U.S. sanctions could move Brazil, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, India and others away from using the dollar. "And I've been a supporter of sanctions," he said. "But at some point, you sanction enough people, and you create this entire marketplace that's sanctioned," and that creates an incentive to try to find a way around the sanctions by buying goods in China's yuan.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
Brian Nelson, the Treasury Department's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said last month he isn’t too concerned about sanctioned countries using mechanisms to evade the U.S. dollar and the American financial system as long as sanctions are imposed multilaterally (see 2305190039). With multilateral sanctions, those countries wouldn’t have to avoid only the dollar, but they also would have to cut out the Japanese yen, the European euro and the British pound, he said.