- cross-posted to:
- worldnews
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews
As per the deal, 95 per cent of the $260 billion worth of trade will be settled in yuan.
It’s like an economic visual of Putin’s balls in Xi Jinpeng’s grip. The other 5%? A blend of rubles and euros.
In essence, BRICS is trying to make the yuan a world reserve currency. That’s how they’re going to “sanction proof” them selves, by leaning on Chinese economy, and tbh, since a crapton of manufacturing and fabrication already happens in China, it does make a lot of sense.
Perhaps we’ll see the return of cold war era economic policies as a result. You can almost hear the liberals (neo or classical, take your pick - they both suck) begrudgingly press the button marked “Protectionism”.
In any case, welcome to the CwaaS, or “Cold war as a Service”. Smack SWIFT and BRICS together, see what happens.
since a crapton of manufacturing and fabrication already happens in China, it does make a lot of sense.
Western manufacturing and fabrication is already pulling out of China; this action will accelerate that trend. It’s also a poor bet due to China’s slow motion demographic collapse.
Frankly this could be implemented tomorrow and by the end of 2034 it would be dead; torn apart by internal conflict and China’s gradual economic decline.
I feel like this not being the case would be a headline, but the fact of it is, or should be, patently unsurprising
I mean, isn’t De-dollarization the entire point of creating a new currency as an alternative to the US dollar?
This would be about trade. Your country can make whatever currency it likes, but when you go to buy goods overseas, you tend to have to pay in USD. Not always, but it’s the default.
BRICS don’t like this, for obvious reasons, but they lack alternatives. They can try shifting to the Chinese Yuan, but that only moves the problem for everyone who isn’t China. They can try to make their own currency union, but they aren’t even as politically united as the EU, and the Euro has issues keeping everyone moving the same direction.
If you want to see power struggle, just keep an eye on that group. India and China are rivals. They will try to undermine each other’s ability to gain more power.
It’s not even a cohesive group. It was some dude at Goldman Sachs seeing a few countries grow quickly and even then it was more like brIC since Brazil and Russia saw growth only from resource extraction. South Africa decided they wanted to be part of the show despite shit growth and it became BRICS. They don’t do that much trade with each other and now outside of China, their growth is shit. If they want to become more economically integrated, go for it.
I don’t get it. They’re still using all of their local currencies? Why not band together and do a united currency like the Euro or the CFA Franc?
Why not band together and do a united currency like the Euro or the CFA Franc?
Because that requires a unified monetary policy. The BRICs countries don’t actually have that much in common, meaning they need to treat their domestic monetary policies to be most advantageous internally. Having one currency wouldn’t allow that. What it really boils down to is how a country included would be able to spend its own money and how much debt it would be allowed to carry.
Because that would fail very quickly. The CFA franc works because France dominated their exports. The euro took a long fucking time to make work and took a lot of planning and market integration. Even then it has some struggles.
brICs has very little market integration. While many of them do a good chunk of trade with China, it’s often not very even. Essentially it would be China dictating monetary policy which also ties itself to US monetary policy via a floating peg. There is also no freedom of movement between most of them. Without that, countries can very easily fall into a liquidity trap and be forced to deflate because of capital flight. As bad as the PIIGS financial crises were, they would have been significantly worse without people being able to move away from the countries.
The article said 95% of the trade will be denominated in Chinese Yuan for trade primarily between China and Russia. Russia really cannot use dollars right now because of sanctions, so we will see what their appetite is to hold large sums of Chinese currency as reserves.