seems like legitimizing the outright theft of foreign assets is going to give billionaires around the world some second thoughts about the security of their dollars held in u.s. banks
Oh no losing access to economies that are going into a deep recession, how horrible. Meanwhile, western capital will quickly find its way to places like China where there is actual economic growth happening. Which in fact is already happening https://english.news.cn/20240411/07321170aa0944d4a588a4de0d8beac2/c.html
No, the point is that this move undermines western financial system because billionaires all over the world will realize that if they or the government of their country runs afoul of the west, then their assets will be stolen. Meanwhile, freezing and seizing the assets of Russian billionaires amounts to the west doing capital controls for Russia. This would've been a very unpopular move if the Russian government imposed such controls, but the west decided to helpfully do that themselves. This forced Russian oligarchs to invest domestically resulting in Russian economy growing faster than the west now.
No defending Russian capitalists here, I want them all to be stripped of their wealth and the whole Russian state dismantled and replaced by a democratic socialist one. Those rich Russians should be eaten.
But the fact that the Russian state currently is letting their money get stolen (which they knew would happen when they started this war, and those capitalists knew would happen when Russia started this war, which is why they were begging to avoid it) shows that they aren't oligarchs.
Only the countries stealing this money has oligarchs. And this is also evident by the fact that the money is getting stolen, since it's hurting western governmental institutions. The world's trust in the western system is being traded for more money to the capitalists.