I don't have a very thorough understanding of the international money markets. I...

chewz · 2026-01-18T20:11:17 1768767077

It is not possible. Europe's financial markets are the size of Europe's military.

Europe needs US financial markets (dollars) to finance its debt as all European bank together could fit into JP Morgan.

Switching away from SWIFT or Visa/Mastercard is also improbable as Europe lack tech skills to run such complex systems.

pintxo · 2026-01-18T22:10:22 1768774222

#8 + #9 by assets are combined bigger than JP Morgan (which is #5 on the list) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_banks]

SWIFT sits in Belgium, why would anyone in Europe need to switch away from it? Is the US able to handle their (international) financial transactions without access to SWIFT?

The financial market being significantly smaller, sure, but will it stay like that?

Quickly summing up total spending of the European countries on this list, the Europeans seem to spend about half of what the US spends on the military, quite a lot more than I expected. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...]

chewz · 2026-01-18T22:35:56 1768775756

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-09-02/does-e...

As for SWIFT it is US executive branch that decides who to take off the system

pintxo · 2026-01-18T22:41:09 1768776069

But that's a political thing, not a technical.

> SWIFT’s data centers, located in the United States, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, act as the network’s central hubs, processing and routing messages across the network. The centralization at these data centers is critical for swift (no pun intended) and secure data transmission. These data centers are designed with redundancy and failover capabilities, so if one center is disrupted, the others take over, ensuring no interruptions to the SWIFT service.

[https://ahrvo.substack.com/p/how-does-swift-really-work]

To me, this sounds like SWIFT would posibly be split into 3-parts, without any redundancy. A US and a EU datacenter handling "local" business, with Switzerland possibly be able to interact with either?