S&P Dow Jones Indices announced Friday (March 4) that it will remove stocks listed or domiciled in Russia from its benchmarks because of the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
This will have the effect of further isolating the country from the global economy. The removal will be effective before the open on Wednesday (March 9) and will also affect Russian American depository receipts.
The firm is the keeper of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500, and it also plans to declassify Russia as an emerging market. Instead, the country will be listed as a standalone group. Earlier on Friday, the NYSE also stopped trading in three Russian exchange-traded funds (ETFs), saying they had “regulatory concerns.”
According to a Friday CNBC report, ETFs tracking Russian stocks have been doing poorly since Russia invaded Ukraine, with the iShares MSCI Russia ETF falling 33.4% as of March 1, making for the worst day since the fund was created in 2010.
Shares of the VanEck Russia ETF were down 54.9% at the end of February — the poorest month for that ETF in its whole history.
PYMNTS wrote recently that the European Union, after already banning numerous Russian banks from international payments system SWIFT, is also considering extending the ban to banks in Belarus.
See also: Report: EU Considers SWIFT Ban for Belarus Banks
The EU said it’s “also looking now at the preparation of the equivalents for the Belarus financial sector, but knowing that SWIFT is not as strategically important in the Belarus economy as it is in the Russian side,” according to an unnamed official.
Russia has faced attacks from various sectors globally over its unprovoked attack on Ukraine, from the bank sanctions to boycotts from numerous companies. However, China has announced it doesn’t plan to join in on the sanctions, with the regulator there saying the country is opposed to the sanctions.
Read more: China Will Sit Out Russia Sanctions, Regulator Says
China said it plans to keep up normal economic trade and financial exchange with “relevant parties.”
According to Guo Shuqing, head of the regulator in China, sanctions don’t typically produce good results and may not have a legal basis.
