From Daniel Larison:

The recent act of “the West” — governments and central bankers in league and in unison — to expropriate what Biden called “Putin’s $630 billion war fund” is really off the charts by way of economic warfare, something that just wasn’t done in the 18th and 19th centuries, even in terrible extremities. Debts were paid, even to cretins. The reputation for trustworthiness was the banker’s most precious asset, and it became the creed of nations. Only by an authoritative legal process, governed by the law of nations, might someone else get their hands on your stash.

In the three centuries before 1914, beginning the age in which all restraints in war, military and economic, were obliterated, such a default was seen in “civilized Europe” as equivalent to the method of “the barbarian” — “we like, we take.” But not only by them. Vigorous shakings of the head in disapproval would also have come from the Princes of Africa, the Sultan of the Turks, the Kings of Persia and China, the Great Mogul of India, the Grand Duke of Moscovy, the Emperor of Ethiopia (Prester John), the rulers of Japan and Morocco, and the Khanate of Crimea………

…The commentariat treats this Vast and Unprecedented Expropriation, this Financial H-Bomb, alongside things like sanctioning Putin’s niece as just parts of a generic class of “sanctions,” as if they were two peas in a pod, when the Central Bank Expropriations are a revolutionary stake into the heart of the global economic system. They will one day be seen as hurtling us to a new monetary order, distinguished across the East-West divide by a rabid neomercantilism, wealth-destroying but inexorable.

In name the central bank actions are a freeze, but in actuality they constitute a debt repudiation, a default, on a far bigger scale than anything engineered by the Bolsheviks, who put the debts of the Tsar to the torch when they came to power.

The situation is made all the more incredible by two facts. First, the contemporary default occurred at the center of the financial order, not at its periphery. That makes it staggering and unlike any other. Second, it was cooked up in a couple of hours by U.S. government staffers. Previous discussions of sanctions had always treated Russia’s removal from SWIFT as the Absolute Weapon. The Great Freeze on Russian assets never made it into the press.

Our leaders in thought and action, the ones at the top of the political and financial and corporate media hierarchy, violated the first rule, the indispensable rule, the rule on which our grand financial edifice was built. Full faith and credit wasn’t just a phrase; it was a way of life. The idea of it, a new model of civilization, generated rules that most princes and peoples came to respect. No more………

Cassandra would like to say in reply: the Great Expropriation will come to be regarded as the financial equivalent of Operation Barbarossa, which sowed terror in all that lay in its path but which created through overextension and hubris the basis for its subsequent reversal. Our leaders, our “oligarchs,” have not necessarily shot themselves in the foot with these measures, but they have definitely shot their peoples in the foot, and they do not seem to care.