This is Russia’s most direct debunking of the Alt-Media Community’s false perceptions about BRICS thus far. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov published an article in South Africa’s Ubuntu Magazine on the eve of the 15th BRICS Summit that’ll be hosted in that country. Titled “BRICS: Towards a Just World Order”, he explained how Russia envisages its global role and built upon the efforts earlier this month by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to clarify false perceptions of BRICS. This includes the Alt-Media Community’s (AMC) most popular one imagining that it’s driven by de-dollarization and is resolutely anti-Western.Lavrov began by describing the global systemic transition to multipolarity, particularly its economic-financial dimensions, so as to set the context within which this week’s BRICS Summit is taking place. Of pertinence, he mentioned that “not only Russia, but also a number of other countries are consistently reducing their dependence on the US dollar, switching to alternative payment systems and national currency settlements.”The abovementioned trend isn’t de-dollarization like the AMC understands it to be in the sense of advancing a political decision aimed at phasing out the use of that currency in totality. Rather, it can more accurately be described as diversification from the dollar in order to hedge against forex and other risks posed by dependence on it. While they might appear identical to the average member of the AMC since both goals decrease the dollar’s share in the economy, their motivations are entirely different....
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Andrew Korybko
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India doesn’t want BRICS to dismantle the world order built by the West
M. K. Bhadrakumar | retired diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service and former ambassador
8 comments:
More Russian bullshit. The Ruble is in the toilet. They're in a demographic death spiral. And they're losing the war in Ukraine, with endemic corruption, field mutinies and rampant alcoholism gutting their once mighty army. Vlad Vexler calls the invasion a "self immolating Imperial project".
China is doing better, but not by much. Also major deflation, a crashing of exports and imports, and a massive real estate bubble that the CCP is working desperately to hold off. Plus the One Child Policy has finally come around to bite them on the ass, with an aging population that is not even close to being replaced.
All their bluster about Taiwan is just Xi trying to distract from all that. Unlike Putin, who has become a delusional fool, Xi knows full well attempting to invade Taiwan would be both a military and economic disaster for China.
The certainly serious issues the US faces pale in comparison to which these two are dealing with.
Good luck avoiding the dollar with US trade deficits.
Dollar Uber Alles
As we have discussed before, de-dollarization does no mean replacing the dollar with some other currency. This false assumption makes Westerners think there is no viable alternative to the US dollar. With a new global reserve currency, who would have fiscal authority over it? Who would set monetary policy? China? If so, how would the Chinese yuan be any different from the US dollar?
All these questions are misplaced, since the BRICS are not talking about a new global reserve currency, but a new system of international settlements that is not denominated in a regular “currency” that can be spent. Rather, it is more like Keynes’ idea of a “bancor.” This would not be simply a system payments, transfers or remittances. It would be an alternate system of settlements between various currencies, somewhat like the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel Switzerland, but with less Western control. (The BIS suspended Russia’s membership when the Nuland-Blinken-Sulivan war started in Ukraine.) It could even be the current BIS with modifications. The BIS already has skyscraper offices in Hong Kong and Mexico City, for example.
To establish such a system, participating nations must first decide on the answers to a million questions. This takes time. One particularly thorny complication is the longtime rivalry and mistrust between China and India.
Participating nations would not want to ditch the dollar, only to be saddled with an equally problematic system. Nor do they want to be like the euro-zone, where a tyrannical power sets fiscal policy (i.e. the European Commission in Brussels) and monetary policy (the European Central Bank in Frankfurt).
The USA itself destroyed the dollar’s viability by weaponizing the dollar, and stealing the dollar-denominated assets of anyone that Washington doesn’t like. When the USA stole Russia’s foreign assets, it shocked the world out of its torpor. The world realized that anyone with dollar-denominated assets was vulnerable to U.S. aggression and dementia.
Q. Don't want dollars?
A. Don't export to the US.
Free floating fiat appears to be the best system yet devised to facilitate international trade.
Q. What is the function of a reserve currency?
A. Some of us sovereign nations don't like the 'free floating' part.
By Konrad's logic, the US stole Nazi German's property when we froze their assets.
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