Economic sanctions

National's Vanessa Wynning, Labor's Ruben Davidson.

Vanessa, how comfortable are you with the, your government's position on not following the lead of the UK, uh, France, and Canada in hitting Israeli settlements with trade sanctions?

Uh, we've not used trade sanctions generally as a form of, um-

Just hold on there.

We have.

TSA PreCheck members just have to apply online three days before their visit in order to get approval before going to the airport, and their pass will only be available for one day.

And finally, a dozen countries announced that they're imposing new trade sanctions on Israel by fully halting trade with settlements in the West Bank.

It started with an announcement by just the UK to this effect, but was swiftly followed by ones from Canada, France, Norway, Iceland, Poland, and Sweden.

They also say that they're pushing for an EU-wide ban on transactions with West Bank settlements altogether.

The removal of Maduro in Venezuela and the blockade against Iranian oil flowing has severely impacted China's capabilities of getting oil from Venezuela and Iran.

That is something that I have targeted legislatively with the SHIP Act, the Iran-China Energy Sanctions Act, and something we must continue to prosecute in terms of enacting strong sanctions against China.

This is all interconnected, and we need to recognize that.

Yes, it's so interconnected.

as it stretches into its seventh month.

So it's against that backdrop and those comments that as the war continues, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant was busy at a G20 finance meeting yesterday gathering more support for economic sanctions on Iran.

It comes as Besant told reporters on Sunday he plans to sanction another bank as part of Operation Economic Outcast.

It's what they're calling the U.S. plan to put pressure on Iran and isolate its economy.

And there are some interesting realities with South Africa that I think makes it both unique, but also not entirely convincing that the sanctions were as big of a role as the literature or the narrative, dominant narrative seems to suggest.

But still, that would be only one case.

In almost all of the other cases, Sanctions paved the way for military action before you saw any type of a regime change.

Look at Syria.

It's not sanctions that brought it down.

I'll say one last thing, uh, uh, particularly about sanctions.

Sanction- the f- this is a very impatient president who doesn't understand that the world is not one big corporation where he can just fire people and, and, you know, tell people what to do.

Sanctions take a long time.

That's part of the reason that, you know, sometimes states wanna go to military action, because sanctions are slow and corrosive and take, and take a while.

Um, but I think for now, the, the, you know, if this, if this president looking ahead to, you know, the last two years as a lame duck, um, the best thing he could do is, is pull back from this and, um, try to work with our allies and salvage something out of it in terms of sanctions and containing Iran.

We'll start maybe dovetailing off the conversation that we just had with Chris Campbell about Iran and China and everything else.

Sanctions-wise, there is an effect on the overall scheme of the market, the feeling in the market right now, but it doesn't seem to be the primary catalyst, at least for the time being, and that is Scott Bessent's perhaps use in the future of the Treasury's general account to buy bonds.

What exactly does this interventionist Treasury have to do with the future stability of the interest rate market?

Well, they could affect it, no question.

So here's the thing.

Sanctions do bite.

They do have a consequence.

But we don't have a whole lot of track record, just like we don't have a whole lot of track record with air power alone.