Hedge fund heavyweight Ken Griffin thinks some of the sanctions the U.S. is imposing on Russia will be counterproductive.
The chief executive of Citadel said that includes curbing Russian access to U.S. technology and to U.S. dollars.
Griffin said in an interview with Bloomberg that the technology sanctions being slapped on Russia remind him of the ones we’ve placed on China. And he’s certainly not impressed with those.
“We are hurting one of the leading parts of our economy, which is the big tech firms … that have driven so much prosperity for our country,” Griffin said.
“We’re forcing China to develop its own processors, its own software stack, and to be independent from America. They’re going to take those solutions and push them across their sphere of influence.”
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That will make it more difficult for big U.S. tech companies to penetrate emerging markets like Africa, Griffin said. China will market their technologies aggressively there.
“By putting sanctions on American technology vis-à-vis Russia, all we’re doing is accelerating that event,” he said. “Although American sanctions may feel good in the short run, they are really hurting one of our critical success stories in the world, which is our ability to develop technology.”
As for restricting Russia’s ability to obtain dollars, “When we put on the table the possibility that … you can’t move dollars, we’re telling the rest of the world to embrace other currencies in their portfolio,” Griffin said.
“We diminish the value of the dollar as the reserve currency. American taxpayers are going to pay for this in the form of higher interest rates on our debt.”
