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Axios today. It's Monday, February 28th. I'm Nila Buddha. Here's what we're covering today.

President Biden's historic Supreme Court nomination. Plus the American employees who were happiest

working from home. But first, today's one big thing, a financial nuclear threat. Cutting Russia

off from the international financial system over its invasion of Ukraine has been referred to in

recent days as an economic nuclear option. First, let me catch you up on how this has been playing

out. U.S. Treasury action means that Russia's largest banks are already unable to operate in the

dollar-based financial system. In the U.S. and EU also say they'll be targeting the Russian

central bank's currency reserves. Every G7 nation has now committed to banning Russia's biggest

banks from the dollar and euro-based international banking transfer system known as Swift. How effective

can this be? And if we're carrying the nuclear analogy further, how devastating is this also

economically? Axios' chief financial correspondent Felix Salmon is here to answer that hello

Felix. Hi Nila. Everyone's heard about Swift all weekend. First, can you help us understand why

this is so important? It's the way that every single bank in the world talks to each other. Imagine

like the universal language of international banking. And basically, what the world is doing is saying,

oh, Russians, we're not going to let you speak our language anymore. If you want to move money

around from one bank to another or from like a Russian bank to a foreign bank or the other way

around, you're going to have to find some other way of doing it rather than the really, really

easy and cheap and quick way of going through Swift. The more important thing honestly came a couple

...