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Is there not an obvious OPSEC explanation? You had a prior understanding that you and Jeroboam were in good relation and that he was literally investing in the relationship, with the expectation that it was a long-term investment. If he suddenly asks for his money back, you're gonna start wondering what he's up to, what's changed, why is he acting so weird? Imagine Avon Barksdale saying, "Yo String, I love what you've been doing with investing our money, but actually, I'd like to just withdraw my half. Cash. Right now. What am I gonna do with it? I don't know; nothing in particular. I just like looking at it." Even high-level corporate folks are often required to have significant investment in their own companies, and questions are asked if they seem to be withdrawing too much. "Do they know something? Are they thinking that this corporate partnership is becoming a bad deal? Might they jump ship?" If having the investment is essentially known to all parties to be, in part, a trust mechanism to indicate whether everything is normal and good and that defection can be "punished" by confiscating part/all of that investment, sudden withdrawal of that investment may contain a lot of signal. Maybe dude just wants to build a new mansion or buy twitter or something... but maybe...
In the international realm, there is a delicate balance between quietly trying to organize your affairs to try to make your regime more sanctions-proof and retaining enough ambiguity about the likelihood that you're going to suckerpunch someone.
Opsec explanation seems fine to me. Yes if you liquidate your dollar account the world would be asking why are you doing that and assume it’s something like war.
That being said I am not sure Russia was capable of liquidating dollars even if they wanted to.
They could have gone to Goldman Sachs and told them here is $300 billion give me gold. They would move the price of gold significantly. Then they do war. Let’s say they win war. Now they want to use the gold to buy real things. Selling 300 billion of gold would drive the price down. A second issue is now the global market doesn’t like Russia. Trading in gold gets a negative reputation. Maybe Chile’s central bank wanted more gold but now gold is known as Russian money and buying gold helps bad people.
My point is I agree their is an opsec angle but de-dollarizing into something else is perhaps impossible but definitely not easy.
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