“The latest round of U.S. sanctions was a mostly symbolic exercise,” Agathe Demarais, global forecasting director at The Economist Intelligence Unit, told CNBC on Friday. “Sanctions on Russian individuals and companies are irrelevant, as these people and firms have no ties to the US and probably no intention to ever use the U.S. dollar or to have bank accounts in the U.S.” Demarais added that the sanctions on sovereign debt are less stringent than the initial market reaction would suggest, since they only target the primary debt market and can therefore “easily be circumvented via the secondary market.”