I’d heard that a major EU player was looking at the BRICS system and it turns out that it may be France:
According to French media reports, French President Emmanuel Macron has asked South African President Cyril Ramaphosa for an invitation to the BRICS Summit scheduled for August. This news has not been confirmed by the Élysée Palace yet, and the spokesperson for the South African president claimed to be unaware of Macron’s request.
The French have never liked the dollar based system seeing the benefit it gave the USA:
Perhaps never before had a chief of state launched such an open assault on the monetary power of a friendly nation. Nor had anyone of such stature made so sweeping a criticism of the international monetary system since its founding in 1944. There was Charles de Gaulle last week proclaiming that the primacy of the dollar in international dealings was finished, calling for an eventual return to the gold standard —which the world’s nations scrapped 50 years ago — and practically inviting other countries to follow France’s lead and cash in their dollars for gold. It was a particularly nettling irritant just as the U.S. was deeply involved in making some hard decisions about its monetary policy.
I did a double take on that line. Maybe someone can confirm, somehow, I remember it was France, under de Gaulle, that was draining US gold reserves, leading to Nixon removing the gold peg to the US dollar.
There was quite a lot about it in the press at the time. I remember De Gaulle ranting about the ‘exorbitant privilege’ it gave the USA. This is a good summary of events although I didn’t realize that the UK also wanted our gold back:
This system worked quite well, especially for the Americans. They could print money to buy imports while the rest of the world first had to sell something in order to get the US dollars needed to buy imports.
The French called this an exorbitant privilege — a phrase made famous by Charles de Gaulle, who liked to rant and rave about it. Eventually, his successor, Georges Jean Raymond Pompidou, decided to call out the arrangement by staging a bank run on the US dollar. He converted France’s dollars into gold and sent a French warship to New York Harbor to collect France’s gold.
Once the UK joined the queue, signalling a serious bank run was underway, the US responded by defaulting on the arrangement and ended the US dollar’s convertibility into gold.
Exorbitant privilege even got its own Wikipedia entry
Following the USA’s default it was Kissinger who saved the international status of the dollar by what was know as the petrodollar:
Being able to forge money legally is an ‘exorbitant privilege’ which America defends with its mighty military, why else take our Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi just because the first wanted to sell oil in Euros and the other wanted to create a pan-African gold based Dinar?
The money forging is then papered over with a debt limit comedy that people lap up.
In a secular world only two sources of power remain, guns and money.
BRICS is not about Russia, China or any particular nation. It was called BRICS by Goldmen Sachs and, when started, consisted of the world’s fastest growing economies that were outside the G7.
It keeps evolving and now looks like it wants to aim for an alternative payments system outside the dollar based SWIFT system.
No one will be forced to use it. It could prove a competitor to SWIFT and I’m all for a bit of competition.
The French are particularly good at looking after French interests and will turn in a second if it suits them.
Instead of adding a lot of reasons this is simple, the French, Germans and English would have loved to have gone back to colonialism. Qaddafi? Such an innocent man?
You have a choice as a nation you can be a half behinded republic or a dictatorship which is the most common thing in history.
If you guys want to support dictators because your place of reside has said the dollar is killing our economy that is weak. Of course the dollar has destroyed your economy.
Then again Ireland is not a dictatorship, Germany is not a dictatorship and both have flourished. Not sure what your point is? Oh Germany was supposed to do a lot better than the US…sure and the EU was supposed to make that happen but unfairly the US stopped that? Is that your point? It does not work that way.
The French left NATO because the US would not have used nukes to defend central Europe against the Russians. The French would have. In that France became a way of defusing east west tensions. A role that supports the US. How? Because it is less costly for us to approach dictators with an extra player working a different angle on the dictator’s process. The US is too staunch in its approach to work with our own public to achieve more than one discussion in the discord. That does not mean we need more ideas. The dictators need more ideas.
Everyone loves competition, but at this point it isn’t in the same zip code as a serious proposal. The BRICS countries trade more with the EU and US than they do with each other (by a lot), so a non-dollar payment system doesn’t make a ton of sense.
But the real problem is practical: China has by far the largest economy of the BRICS and second place isn’t close. So any BRICS payment scheme would need to involve the Chinese banking system. But China doesn’t allow foreign accept to its capital markets, so this proposal is DOA.
As science pushes back against the god of the gaps and liberal democracy pushes back against theocracy (remember the divine right of pope appointed kings?) religion plays a diminishing role in our lives…
…not that money and power are any more egalitarian. Do everything you can not to get domesticated by the powers that be that want to rules over a tame herd of sheep, like religion of old.
Of course they are. With religion you cannot challenge anything, it’s codified doctrine set in stone. With money and power at least you have the chance to change it: you can get money (not everyone does) and you can get power (not everyone does) but that doesn’t make it impossible.
