Didactic Mind explains the significance of the BRICS Pay card announced last week:
Each individual BRICS+ nation is at a different stage of development along the path of having a proper banking system. Therefore, trying to create a unified messaging and money transfer platform, is COLOSSALLY difficult. The back-end infrastructure of global payment systems IS NOT easy to build – take my word for it on this – and nor is it a trivial matter to get different national payment systems to work together. I have barely even begun to describe the problems involved, and I am by no means a deep-knowledge subject matter expert on the issue.
But… we are now seeing the beginnings of a new financial order coming together. And that BRICS payment card prototype, is the first demonstration of the front-end technology. Whether the back-end is fully operational, is very much open to question – but it does seem to be getting there.
The importance of this development cannot be overstated. If the architects of the Western financial system are paying any attention whatsoever to the upcoming BRICS summit in Kazan’, which starts very soon – in fact, the BRICS Business Forum wrapped up just today – then they should be sweating bullets.
The advent of a true globally scalable, secure, stable, and reliable BRICS+ payment system will allow for rapid digital settlements between BRICS+ central banks. That was one of the original ideas behind this system – to use some sort of digital currency backbone to settle in national currencies between different countries. I had heard many different idea proposed, ranging from a stablecoin of some kind, to a gold-backed and metals-backed currency, to a new currency built on a basket of currencies, like the old “bancor” idea that John Maynard Keynes proposed as the fundamental unit of exchange within the old Bretton Woods system, or the Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) that the IMF has the ability to issue.
If, or rather, in my opinion, WHEN, this becomes a reality – in whatever form it takes – the dominance of the dollar is DONE.
This is not hyperbole. Think about it. Why would anyone want to use SWIFT, and pay the (quite exorbitant, in relative terms) fees to send money through a literal cartel of correspondent banks to transfer money overseas, when they could go through a digital system with far lower fees, and transact directly in local currencies, with local exchange rates? And if people can do this peer-to-peer, or business-to-business… what need is there for the dollar?
I think this is why we’re seeing the Clown World provocations heating up everywhere from the Korean Peninsula to Ukraine. The end of military supremacy is bad enough, but the direct undermining of the international dollar system spells out the end of Clown World. And desperate people accept very low-probability odds…