(This essay is adapted from the following video)
While the Ukraine war still goes on, the world has observed how Russia has managed itself in a finance war alongside the hot war, including showing resistance to being banned from the Swift system. Now, the ruble is rated the top-performing currency of the year by Bloomberg. Meantime, events like seizing and freezing Russia's overseas assets have drawn controversial responses from the West. Now there's a worldwide sentiment questioning the dollar's dominance.
Some are asking, "Is De-dollarization finally upon us?" Even Silicon Valley personalities like Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, have tweeted, "Did the dollar lose its global reserve status?" Dorsey might have asked this trillion-dollar question lightly, but in a more serious fashion, in a letter to his investors, CEO of Black Rock Larry Fink declared, "Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades."
And we all know the globalization we have experienced over the past three decades is anchored by dollar’s hegemony. In this episode, instead of giving you a linear answer to questions like "Will the de-dollarization ever happen?" I'd like to share with you a speculation of mine, why the BPTF, the BRICs Payment Task Force, is the strongest contender to US dollar as a cross-border payment settlement tool, therefore the biggest threat to Dollar's dominance.
And let's begin by digging into a few news and events that led up to the recent announcement on BPTF, via the 2022 BRICS Beijing declaration. Interestingly, these events received little coverage from the American mainstream media. In April 2022, I discovered an interview with Sergey Glazyev discussing a potential new monetary system. Glazyev is the former Minister of Foreign Economic Relations and a leading economist in Russia. By the way, if you search his name and his publications, you might want to use a different search engine than Google as they are often censored by Google. In this interview, Glazyev declared a Russia-China synthetic new digital currency is coming its way. He also provided detailed outlooks on what this synthesized digital currency will look like, the stages of its development, and how it would be adopted by BRICs, the acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa’s member states.
This interview was, of course, barely mentioned by American mainstream media. Neither much from Chinese media outlets. However, I did discover in 2017, there was quite a lot of news coverage in China announcing the two countries, Russia and China, were working on a synthetic digital currency to counter dollar's status as an international trade settlement vehicle. So apparently, this virtual currency was started back when President Trump declared the tariff war against China in 2016, and it has been quietly worked on ever since. Today, the 2022 Ukraine war served this concept as a testing ground, and the 2022 BRICs summit brought this concept to the spotlight. At this year's BRICS summit, Russia President Putin called for developing an international reserve currency based on a basket of currencies.
While Chinese President Xi Jinping, in his opening remarks, stated, "We should also expand BRICS cooperation on cross-border payment and credit rating to facilitate trade, investment, and financing among our countries." Now let's dig in to see what this Russia-China synthesized currency is about and what it is not about? How is it going to be developed by phases? And interestingly, what I discovered about the turning point for this concept by tracing back the origin of this concept. (Spoiler alert: It’s not Russia nor China that came up with this currency idea but the west invented it.) And lastly, what messages this Russia-China-led digital currency is sending out to the world. At the end of this episode, I will share a timeline of critical events that led up to today’s potential dual international monetary system.
So what's this currency look like? First, it is an index composed of a basket of currencies and linked to a series of exchange-traded commodities. As Glazyev claims, it is a monetary unit based on an expandable basket, which was mathematically modeled and has demonstrated a high degree of resilience and stability. And the linked commodities include precious metals such as gold, hydrocarbons or carbon hydrates such as grains, sugar, and natural resources such as water. Or as someone joke-fully puts, "Russia and China collect the wheat while eating rice." And according to this interview, such composition makes this monetary system more resilient than the Lehman Brother financial crisis.
Secondly, this currency system allows a credit and settlement system outside of the SWIFT. The interview says, "It will generate credit in their own currencies and use it for national investment, industry financing, and national wealth accumulation. Cross-border capital flows will continue to be governed by national currency regulations." In other words, it will allow member states to escape the debt and financing system that has been operated by the IMF and Swift. Thirdly, it’s a stable coin and it takes the banking the unbanked onto a sovereign level. According to the interview, "In parallel in developing the clearing mechanisms, there are efforts also made to develop a digital non-banking payment system, which would (also) be linked to gold and other exchange-traded commodities." So it’s a stablecoin except this stablecoin is designed to leave the western banking system. Lastly, what is this new currency not about? Glazyev made it clear it is NOT the Brentwood III. This new currency will only be used for cross-border payments and will be issued in the participating countries according to a set scheme.
In the interview, Glazyev also visualized three development phrases for this new digital currency. The first phrase can be summarized as "home-based, gold-anchored but still dollar-denominated." In this phrase, Member states fall back on using their national currencies and clearing mechanisms, backed by bilateral currency swaps. At this point, price formation is still mostly driven by price at various exchanges, denominated in dollars. This phrase is almost over, says Glazyev, "Because after Russia’s reserves in dollars, euro, pound, and yen were frozen, it is unlikely that any sovereign country will continue accumulating reserves in these currencies." Their immediate replacement is national currencies and gold. In the phrase II, a new pricing mechanism is to be introduced that no longer references the dollar, although pricing in member states' own national currency can be costly but, as the interview explains, it will still be more attractive than pricing in un-anchored currencies like dollar, pound, euro, and yen. Glazyev also explains why Chinese yuan cannot be counted in the new price formation mechanism. Because although the Chinese Yuan is deemed the only remaining global reserve currency candidate, it has difficulty in terms of convertibility and China’s restriction in foreign capital accessing the Chinese capital market also prohibits that. And so is gold. Gold as a price reference is constrained by its inconvenience as a payment option. And then it comes to the phrase III, where this new digital currency would be formally introduced at this phrase. It is a payment system founded on an international agreement based on principles of transparency, fairness, goodwill, and efficiency.
Inside the basket of the participating currencies, The weight of each currency in the basket could be proportional to the country’s GDP (for example, based on its purchasing power parity), its shares in international trade, as well as the population and territory size of participating countries. Glazyev also predicts this payment system to be first issued among BRICS countries, but all interested countries can join as they wish.
Now after the explanation of this new monetary system, it’s not difficult to realize this concept was actually first introduced by the International Monetary Fund or IMF, when it created SDR, the special drawing rights, which is like an ETF but for a basket of national currencies. Actually, Glazeyv admitted this concept is indeed modeling IMF’s SDR idea, except IMF’s SDR is composed of the U.S. dollar, euro, Chinese yuan, Japanese yen, and British pound. Glazyev envisioned a new global currency indexed by the currencies of the participating countries and he, along with his colleagues, first proposed this idea at the Astana Economic Forum as a method to a transition to a new global economic system. And that was in 2012. However, a turning point to speed up this currency’s development didn’t come until 2016 when President Trump declared a tariff war against China.
In this interview, Glazyev called China the US’s main economic competitor and Russia the US’s main adversary. And he blames the US’s ruling elites for having launched a global hybrid war against both. He believes, "Initially the US was trying to create geopolitical conflicts between Russia and China (but eventually) it launched a tariff war with China and the economic sanctions war with Russia." Consequently, it led to China and Russia bound by the common interests of survival and resistance. Indeed, China and Russia’s deepened bounding since 2016 is not hard to be evidenced. For example, in 2019 BBC reports President Xi Jinping has praised President Vladimir Putin as his best friend. Xi reportedly said, "In the past six years, we have met nearly 30 times. Russia is the country that I have visited the most times, and President Putin is my best friend and colleague." Now we have analyzed the technical part of the new global currency and some of its crucial timeline. But what are the messages it signals to the world? First, Glazeyev admits it’s not a Brent Wood III, but clearly an alternative to the SWIFT system.
I think it is apparent this new monetary system is not a Brent Wood III, in that it primarily targets member states from EAEU, the Eurasian Economic Union. But Glazeyev also made it clear, besides EAEU members, this system is for SCO, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and BRICS members to eliminate critical dependence on the US-controlled SWIFT system. Secondly, Glazye is not shy to declare this new global economic system anchored by this new global digital currency will lead to the collapse of the global economic order anchored by the US dollar, which is the foundation of US’s world domination. And The end is imminent. Thirdly, this new currency system will establish a new world order between the global South and North, becoming a challenge to the current Anglo-Saxon-led world order. And why will it attract the Global Southern states? Glazeye explains, "With Russia, China, Eurasia, BRICS, India, Iran, and Turkey as founding members (of this new currency system), we aim to include all countries in the southern hemisphere. Countries participating in the new system have no reason to repay their dollar or euro debt. Therefore, all southern countries will rush to join the new union and nationalize energy resources without worrying IMF sanctions. This puts a rival zone to the dollar-denominated west. Lastly, this new economic system will unite different classes of society and increase common prosperity, much more so than Anglo-Saxon and European descent. That's the main reason Washington didn't win the global hybrid war. This is also the main reason why the current dollar-centric world financial system will be replaced by a new system based on the consensus of the countries participating in the new world economic order.
To recap the series of events concerning the subject of de-dollarization, I put together a timeline to show some highlights of how critical events have developed over the years. By the way, this timeline will be continuously updated, and I will put a shareable link in below in case you are interested in being kept in the loop. In 1969, IMF came up with SDR, special driving rights, a concept under the Brent Wood system. In 1981, SDR reduced its basket to five currencies: the United States dollar, Deutsche mark, French franc, British pound, and the Japanese yen; in 1999, Euro replaced the French franc and Deutsche mark, and the SDR reduced to four currencies. In 2012, China voiced its concerns over the international monetary system and proposed a substitute to allow exchange of U.S. dollars into SDR. The same year, 2012, Sergey Glazyev, an influential Russian politician and economist, for the first time, proposed a new international money currency index, an idea similar to SDR but composed of participating countries’ national currencies.
In 2014, over that year's Russia-Ukraine war, the US joined the EU to post sanctions on Russia's financial, energy, and defense sectors. Russia started to prepare itself to leave the SWIFT system. In 2015, the IMF approved the Chinese Yuan to join SDR, and it came into effect in Oct 2016. In 2017, US President Trump announced an investigation into China's economic practices, which eventually led to the tariff war on China, which is still ongoing. In the same year of 2017, many news reports from China reporting Russia and China were working on a digital currency together. Fast forward to 2022, on Feb 24, Russia announced invasion of Ukraine; the US shortly announced banning Russia from the Swift system again. Meanwhile, the West started to freeze and seize Russian’s overseas assets. In March 2022, in an interview, Sergei Glazyev announced a China-Russia led synthetic digital currency is coming its way and will likely be first joined by BRICS. In June 2022, at the BRICS Beijing summit, both President Xi and President Putin made announcements calling for the development of an international reserve currency based on a basket of currencies. On June 23, in the BRICS Summit Beijing Declaration, it was announced a new cross-border payment system is being developed by BPTF, short for BRICS Payment Task Force. Meanwhile, more countries joined BRICS including Iran and Argentina. And Saudi Arabia is reportedly considering joining BRICS.
In July 2022, Putin announced Russia is banning bitcoin. That’s what we have so far for the timeline. Although BPTF, in my opinion, is so far the biggest challenger to the current dollar-dominated international monetary system, how influential and practical BRICS cross-border payment system can be is still waiting to be seen and challenging dollar’s hegemony won’t happen overnight, if it ever happens at all. I am sure new events and news will be added to this timeline while the world seems entering a multipolar order. I will keep you posted. And see you in the next episode.