Matthieu Crozet, Julian Hinz, Amrei Stammann, Joschka Wanner
Politics affects the banking sector in many ways (e.g. Calomiris and Huber 2014). For example, governments in many countries direct commercial bank lending to specific sectors and/or stimulate lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (e.g. Brown and Dinc 2005). And during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, many governments created emergency loan guarantee schemes that were covering and spurring their banks lending. In this column, we turn to another recent and striking episode of political impact, namely, the global financial sanctions on Russian banks with close ties to their domestic government that commenced in 2014 and were sequentially imposed on various banks during a five-year period. In general, economic sanctions become increasingly popular from 2010s, being mostly driven by the US to restrain politically unfavourable regimes (Felbermayr et al. 2021). While their effects at the firm level are well studied (Croz