The Difficult Realities Of The Brics Dedollarization Efforts And The Renminbis Role

As the BRICS bloc expands, efforts by BRICS policymakers to increase global use of non-dollar currencies—particularly the Chinese renminbi—are accelerating. Washington should take note of how frustrations with the dollar are helping enable the rise of the renminbi in emerging markets and motivating strategic partners like India to push for greater use of non-dollar currencies.

Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, or the BRICS nations, are living proof of how power and influence are constantly changing in the world's politics and economy. Redefining their positions within the global system and laying the groundwork for a multilateral world order that aims to challenge the traditional dominance of Western economies and institutions, the BRICS countries have been active since the acronym was coined in the early 21st century and expanded to include South Africa in 2010. Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Argentina, Bolivia, Indonesia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Cuba, Gabon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Comoros, and Kazakhstan are among the more than 40 nations that have shown interest in becoming BRICS members. Now, after a huge expansion, the BRICS has grown into a more formidable club of nations with the recent addition of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE. Also, Saudi Arabia is still working on becoming a full member, even though Javier Milei, Argentina's newly elected president, turned down the invitation. Given that BRICS now includes over 40 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's economy, it's easy to see why the organization is so essential to be better understood. Given this, the purpose of this TPQ special issue is to delve into the background, reality, and future prospects of the BRICS as well as the various reasons and motivations behind the accession of its member states.

It is, as a critic of U.S.

This publication examines Mongolia’s recent economic development and outlines reforms that would help the country take advantage of its many opportunities. Mongolia is rich in natural resources and, although landlocked, is well-placed to boost trade with its two giant neighbors. The country needs to diversify its economy beyond mining, enhance economic stability, and increase employment. To maximize Mongolia’s potential the government can improve macroeconomic management, enhance the skill base, and provide hard and soft infrastructure to promote trade and efficient logistics. Governance and institutional reforms are also crucial. The government will need to continue to drive reforms so that they are well implemented and deliver the intended change.

Global growth appears to be stabilizing after a period of marked weakness, but it remains fragile. A modest recovery in emerging market and developing economies continues to be constrained by subdued investment, which is dampening prospects and impeding progress toward achieving critical development goals. Downside risks to the outlook remain elevated, and policymakers continue to face major challenges to boost resilience and foster long-term growth. this issue includes essays on the benefits and risks of government borrowing, recent investment weakness in emerging market and developing economies, the pass-through of currency depreciations to inflation, and the evolution of growth in low-income countries.

In the past, foreign shocks arrived to national economies mainly through trade channels, and transmissions of such shocks took time to come into effect. However, after capital globalization, shocks spread to markets almost immediately. Despite the increasing macroeconomic dangers that the situation generated at emerging markets in the South, nobody at the North was ready to acknowledge the pro-cyclicality of the financial system and the inner weakness of “decontrolled” financial innovations because they were enjoying from the “great moderation.” Monetary policy was primarily centered on price stability objectives, without considering the mounting credit and asset price booms being generated by market liquidity and the problems generated by this glut. Mainstream economists, in turn, were not majorly attracted in integrating financial factors in their models. External pressures on emerging market economies (EMEs) were not eliminated after 2008, but even increased as international capital flows augmented in relevance thereafter. Initially economic authorities accurately responded to the challenge, but unconventional monetary policies in the US began to create important spillovers in EMEs. Furthermore, in contrast to a previous surge in liquidity, funds were now transmitted to EMEs throughout the bond market. The perspective of an increase in US interest rates by the FED is generating a reversal of expectations and a sudden flight to quality. Emerging countries’ currencies began to experience higher volatility levels, and depreciation movements against a newly strong US dollar are also increasingly observed. Consequently, there are increasing doubts that the “unexpected” favorable outcome observed in most EMEs at the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) would remain.

In 1971, President Nixon imposed national price controls and took the United States off the gold standard, an extreme measure intended to end an ongoing currency war that had destroyed faith in the U.S. dollar. Today we are engaged in a new currency war, and this time the consequences will be far worse than those that confronted Nixon. Currency wars are one of the most destructive and feared outcomes in international economics. At best, they offer the sorry spectacle of countries' stealing growth from their trading partners. At worst, they degenerate into sequential bouts of inflation, recession, retaliation, and sometimes actual violence. Left unchecked, the next currency war could lead to a crisis worse than the panic of 2008. Currency wars have happened before-twice in the last century alone-and they always end badly. Time and again, paper currencies have collapsed, assets have been frozen, gold has been confiscated, and capital controls have been imposed. And the next crash is overdue. Recent headlines about the debasement of the dollar, bailouts in Greece and Ireland, and Chinese currency manipulation are all indicators of the growing conflict. As James Rickards argues in Currency Wars, this is more than just a concern for economists and investors. The United States is facing serious threats to its national security, from clandestine gold purchases by China to the hidden agendas of sovereign wealth funds. Greater than any single threat is the very real danger of the collapse of the dollar itself. Baffling to many observers is the rank failure of economists to foresee or prevent the economic catastrophes of recent years. Not only have their theories failed to prevent calamity, they are making the currency wars worse. The U. S. Federal Reserve has engaged in the greatest gamble in the history of finance, a sustained effort to stimulate the economy by printing money on a trillion-dollar scale. Its solutions present hidden new dangers while resolving none of the current dilemmas. While the outcome of the new currency war is not yet certain, some version of the worst-case scenario is almost inevitable if U.S. and world economic leaders fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. Rickards untangles the web of failed paradigms, wishful thinking, and arrogance driving current public policy and points the way toward a more informed and effective course of action.

History teaches us important lessons, provided we can discern its patterns. Multi-Polar Capitalism applies this insight to the crucial, yet often underappreciated issue of international monetary relations. When international monetary systems get first put into place successfully, such as the “classic” gold standard in 1879, Bretton Woods in 1945, or the dollar standard in 1982, they structure relations between the system’s centre and the rest of the world so that others can catch up to the leader. But this growth-promoting constellation, a vector for accelerating globalization, runs its course eventually amidst mounting overproduction conditions in key sectors and spreading financial instability. Such periods of global crisis, from the Great Depression of the 1930s to stagflation in the 1970s and creeping deflation during much of the 2010s, force restructuring and policy reforms until conditions are ripe for a renewed phase of sustained expansion. We are facing such a turning point now. As we are moving from a US-dominated world economy towards a multi-polar configuration, we will also see the longstanding dollar standard give way to a multi-currency system. Three currency blocs rooted in the dollar, euro, and yuan will be dominated respectively by the United States, the European Union, and China, each a power centre representing a distinct variant of capitalism. Their complex mix of competition and cooperation necessitates new “rules of the game” promoting the shared pursuit of global public goods, in particular the impending zero-carbon transition, lest we allow fragmentation and conflict shape this next chapter of our history. Multi-Polar Capitalism adds to a century of research and debate on long waves, those roughly half-century cycles first identified by the great Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev in the early 1920s, by highlighting the role of the international monetary system in this distinct boom-and-bust pattern.

Although the internationalization of the Chinese renminbi is an important international political event, most of the studies of it place their analytical focuses largely just on China itself, the issuer of the currency. In contrast, this book addresses the question of how foreign states have responded to the renminbi’s internationalization, during its initial phase through the 2010s, and thereby breaks new ground in exploring the international politics of currency internationalization. It builds a theoretical framework for analyzing a state’s policy toward renminbi internationalization, developing the key concept of reactive currency statecraft. It then applies this framework to the four select cases of the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and the United States. This book reveals that all four of these countries have deliberately utilized their policies related to renminbi internationalization as means of achieving their own foreign policy goals associated with China, goals that have been principally economic in some cases but political in others. Remarkably, the predominant mode of response to the renminbi’s internationalization has been accommodative. Even the United States and Japan—China’s chief geopolitical and also international currency rivals—have never attempted to actively suppress it. This study provides new insights to anyone concerned with the transformation of the world monetary order, while also contributing a valuable analysis of the international politics surrounding the rise of China.