Ex-BoE deputy governor warns Trump could flick financial payments ‘kill switch’
LONDON: Countries that see themselves as US allies are now considering whether President Donald Trump’s administration could one day disrupt their payments systems to exert diplomatic pressure, a former top Bank of England official has said.
Jon Cunliffe, the BoE’s deputy governor for financial stability from 2014 to 2024, said Western countries relied heavily on US-headquartered Visa and Mastercard for day-to-day domestic transactions and found it hard to avoid US banks when making foreign payments.
“What you’ve seen now with Greenland and Canada and other areas is that this particular administration appears to be as likely to use all the levers it has against jurisdictions that you would traditionally think of as its allies as its opponents,” he told an event hosted by Britain’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research late on Tuesday.
“I’ve heard it from people in the payments network: ‘Do I want to use the US system because it might now be weaponized against me?’” Cunliffe added.
