At BRICS Summit, Russia To Push to End Dollar Dominance
Russia is seeking to convince BRICS countries to build an alternative platform for international payments that would be immune to Western sanctions when it hosts the group’s leaders at a summit next week.
President Vladimir Putin is keen to build up BRICS – which has expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates as well as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – as a powerful counterweight to the West in global politics and trade.
The October 22-24 summit in the city of Kazan is being presented by Moscow as evidence that Western efforts to isolate Russia have failed. It wants other countries to work with it to overhaul the global financial system and end the dominance of the US dollar.
Central to that is the proposal for a new payments system based on a network of commercial banks linked to each other through the BRICS central banks, according to a document prepared by Russia’s finance ministry and central bank, distributed to journalists ahead of the summit.
The system would use blockchain technology to store and transfer digital tokens backed by national currencies. This, in turn, would then allow those currencies to be easily and securely exchanged, bypassing the need for dollar transactions. (Read more from “At BRICS Summit, Russia To Push to End Dollar Dominance” HERE)
