Russia Seeks BRICS To Defeat The Dollar.
Russia Seeks BRICS To Defeat The Dollar.. The Ukrainian War Changes The Global Economic Map
Reports Economy News - Follow-up The Economist magazine discussed Russian President Vladimir Putin's plan to defeat the dollar through the BRICS group during the meeting that will bring together less than 20 countries.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin will certainly look great on October 22 when he poses for photos with leaders of perhaps 24 countries, including Narendra Modi of India and Xi Jinping of China, at the BRICS summit in Kazan on the Volga,” the magazine said in a detailed report translated by Al-Eqtisad News.
Last year, when “the bloc met in Johannesburg and expanded from five members to 10, Putin had to stay home to avoid arrest on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. This time he hopes to be seen playing a leadership role in a fast-growing club that challenges the dominance of the Western-led order.”
Now in its 15th year together, “the original BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) has achieved little. Yet Putin hopes at this summit to give the bloc weight by urging it to build a new global financial payments system to challenge America’s dominance of global finance and protect Russia and its friends from sanctions.”
“Everyone understands that anyone can face American or other Western sanctions,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last month. The BRICS payments system would allow “economic operations without dependence on those who have decided to weaponize the dollar and the euro.”
The system, which Russia calls the “BRICS Bridge,” is due to be built within a year and would allow countries to make cross-border settlements using digital platforms run by their central banks. Controversially, it may borrow concepts from a different project called mBridge that is partly run by the Western-led system’s bastion, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
The talks will highlight “the race to reshape the global financial system. China has long been betting that payments technology — not creditor revolts or military conflict — will diminish the power America gets from being at the center of global finance.
The BRICS plan could offer cheaper and faster transactions. Those benefits could be enough to lure emerging economies, suggesting the plan has real potential. Western officials warn it could be designed to evade sanctions.”
Some are frustrated by the unintended role of the Bank for International Settlements, a Swiss-based organization known as the central bank for central banks.
America’s dominance of the global financial system has been a cornerstone of the post-World War II order, reflecting its economic and military heft but also the fact that dollar-denominated assets such as U.S. Treasury bonds are safe from government seizure and inflation, and easy to buy and sell.
Although central banks have diversified their holdings, including in gold, about 58 percent of foreign-exchange reserves are held in dollars, and the dollar’s network effects put U.S. banks at the center of global payments systems.
Sending money around the world is a bit like taking a long flight; if there is no direct connection between two airports, passengers will need to change flights, ideally at a busy hub where many other flights connect. In the world of international payments, the biggest hub is America, where many global banks exchange foreign currencies from those paying in dollars and then into the currencies in which the payments are received.
The centrality of the dollar provides what scholars Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call “panopticon effects” and “choke points.” Because almost all banks that transact in dollars must do so through a correspondent bank in America, it is able to monitor flows for signs of terrorist financing and sanctions evasion, giving America’s leaders a tremendous lever of power—leverage they have been eager to use as an alternative to going to war.
The number of people under U.S. sanctions has risen by more than 900% (to about 9,400) in the two decades to 2021. America has demanded that some foreign banks disconnect from SWIFT, a Belgium-based messaging system used by about 11,000 banks in 200 countries to transfer money across borders. In 2018, SWIFT cut off Iran.
But all this pales in comparison to the ferocity of the financial assault on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The West has frozen $282 billion in Russian assets held abroad, disconnected Russian banks from the SWIFT system, and barred them from processing payments through US banks. America has threatened “secondary sanctions” on banks in other countries that support the Russian war effort.
Even European policymakers, who support the sanctions, were appalled by the speed with which Visa and Mastercard – two US companies on which the eurozone relies for retail payments – closed their doors in Russia.
The tsunami that hit Russia has prompted America’s adversaries to accelerate their efforts to move away from the dollar, and has prompted many other governments to consider their dependence on American financing. China sees this dependence as one of its greatest weaknesses.
Putin hopes to capitalize on this discontent with the dollar at the BRICS summit. For him, creating a new plan is an urgent practical priority as well as a geopolitical strategy. Russia’s foreign-exchange markets now deal almost exclusively in yuan, but because it can’t get enough of the currency to pay for all its imports, it has resorted to barter.
In October, Russia agreed to buy tangerines from Pakistan in exchange for chickpeas and lentils. These liquidity pressures are reportedly increasing.
Putin hopes to make life outside the American system more bearable by laying some of his own financial foundations. BRICS officials have held a series of meetings ahead of the Kazan summit. They discussed creating a credit rating agency to rival the major Western agencies, which Russia sees as “vulnerable to politicization.”
They also discussed creating a reinsurance company to avoid Western agencies, which are barred from reinsuring some tankers carrying Russian oil, and a payment system to replace Visa and MasterCard. Putin has pushed for a common BRICS currency to price trade, based on a basket of gold and other non-dollar currencies, but Indian officials have objected in recent weeks.
The most serious initiative of all is a plan to use digital money backed by fiat currencies. This would put central banks, rather than correspondent banks with access to the US dollar clearing system, at the center of cross-border transactions.
By decentralizing the financial system, the proposal would mean that no country could cut itself off from another. And since commercial banks would transact through their central banks, they would not need to maintain bilateral relationships with foreign banks, avoiding the network effects of the current correspondent banking system.
The BRICS Bridge plan was outlined in a report by the Russian Finance Ministry and Central Bank in October. The 48-page report is critical of Western finance and states that “a new multinational platform for cross-border settlement purposes needs closer examination because of its novelty, associated risks, and potentially game-changing economics.”
With its focus on central bank-operated digital currencies, it appears to be inspired at least in part by an experimental payments platform called mBridge, which the Bank for International Settlements has developed alongside the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. Chinese state media says the new BRICS plan “is likely to draw on lessons learned” from the BIS’s mBridge project.
The BIS experiment was innocently designed and began in 2019, before the full-scale Russian invasion. It has been a stunning success, according to several people involved in the project. It could cut transaction times from days to seconds and transaction costs to virtually zero.
In June, the BIS said mBridge had reached the “minimum viable product” stage and the Saudi central bank joined as a fifth partner in the scheme. Some 31 other members are observers.
By creating a system that could be more efficient than the current one — and that would undermine the dollar’s dominance — the BIS has inadvertently stepped into a geopolitical minefield.
“If someone is transacting outside the dollar system for political reasons, you want it to be more expensive for them than in the dollar system,” says Jay Shambaugh, a senior Treasury official. According to the Federal Reserve, the efficiency gains brought by new types of digital money could erode the use of the dollar in cross-border trade. In turn, they could strengthen China’s currency.
Speaking to bankers and officials about mBridge in September, a Hong Kong official said it “provides another opportunity to allow easier use of the renminbi in cross-border payments, and Hong Kong as an offshore hub will benefit.”
Could mBridge’s concepts and code be replicated by the BRICS, China or Russia? The BIS certainly views mBridge as a joint venture and believes it has the final say on who can join.
However, some Western officials say that participants in the mBridge experiment may be able to pass on the intellectual capital involved to others, including BRICS Bridge participants. China has taken the lead on the software and code behind the mBridge project, according to multiple sources.
The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, leads the project’s technology subcommittee, and its digital ledger was “built by” the PBOC, according to comments made by a BIS official in 2023.
Perhaps that technology and know-how could be used to build a parallel system beyond the reach of the BIS or its Western members. The BIS declined to comment on any similarities between its experiment and Mr. Putin’s plan.
The BRICS’s entry into the payments race highlights the new geopolitical challenges facing multilateral organizations. At the 2020 G20 meeting of major economies, the Bank for International Settlements was tasked with improving the current system and, at China’s urging, experimenting with digital currencies.
Earlier this year, the bank’s president, Augustin Carstens, called for “entirely new structures” and a “radical rethinking of the financial system.”
But with competing goals for different members of the organization, staying above the fray has become more difficult. Cecilia Skingsley, head of the BIS’s innovation center, acknowledges that the world has become more difficult to navigate.
But she says it still has a role to play in solving problems for all countries “almost independently of whatever other agendas they may have.”
One option for the US and its allies is to try to block new payment systems that compete with the dollar. Western officials have warned the Bank for International Settlements that the project could be abused by countries with malign motives.
The BIS has since slowed its work on MBridge, according to some former employees and advisers, and is unlikely to accept any new members. Another option is to improve the existing dollar system so that it is as efficient as new competitors.
The US is already gearing up to compete. In April, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York joined six other central banks in a BIS project aimed at making the current system faster and cheaper. The Fed might also link its domestic instant payments system with those in other countries.
Tom Schacz, Swift’s head of innovation, said this month that it plans to conduct experiments with digital transactions next year, taking advantage of some of its existing advantages, including strong network effects and trust.
But any rival BRICS payments system would face enormous challenges. Liquidity would be difficult to ensure or would require massive implicit government subsidies.
If the underlying flows of capital and trade between two countries were unbalanced, as they often are, they would be forced to pool assets or liabilities in each other’s currencies, which could be unattractive. Indeed, distrust of China runs deep in India, a key BRICS member.
To scale up a digital currency system, countries would need to agree on complex rules governing settlements and financial crime. Such a consensus is unlikely to win in Kazan.
But despite all this, the BRICS plan may be gaining momentum. There is widespread consensus that the current cross-border payments system is too slow and expensive. While rich countries tend to focus on making it faster, many others want to overturn the current system entirely.
The Atlantic Council, a think tank, estimates that at least 134 central banks are experimenting with digital money, mostly for domestic purposes. The number of banks operating such currencies for cross-border transactions has doubled to 13 since Russia invaded Ukraine.
This week’s BRICS summit is no Bretton Woods. All Russia and its allies have to do is move a relatively small number of sanctions-related transactions out of America’s reach. Still, many countries are aiming higher.
Next year’s BRICS summit will be held in Brazil, chaired by its president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has been vocal about the strength of the dollar. “Every night I ask myself why all countries should base their trade on the dollar,” he said last year. “Who decided?” ■