Will Daniel
Fortune, Aug. 16, 2023
“It’s a good job for the West that China and India never agree on anything, because if they did the dominance of the dollar would be a lot more vulnerable. I often say to Chinese policymakers…forget your endless historical battles and try to invite India to share the leadership on some big issues, because then the world might take you a bit more seriously.”
In their push to dethrone the U.S. dollar as the world’s largest reserve currency, the BRICS nations—or Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—have been talking up the idea of a common currency for years. But Jim O’Neill, the veteran economist who coined the term BRIC (the group did not originally include South Africa) when he worked at Goldman Sachs in 2001, blasted the plan this week.
“It’s just ridiculous,” he told the Financial Times Tuesday. “They’re going to create a BRICS central bank? How would you do that? It’s embarrassing almost.”
The BRICS nations will meet for their 15th annual summit next week, but O’Neill, now senior advisor at U.K.-based think tank Chatham House, argued that the group of nations has “never achieved anything since they first started meeting” in 2009 amid consistent infighting.
The push for de-dollarization among BRICS nations has heated up since the war in Ukraine began, as crippling Western sanctions on Russia were enabled by the dollar’s dominance. In April, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva urged the group to develop a serious alternative to the dollar using the combined weight of their economies.
“Why can’t we do trade based on our own currencies?” he said on a state trip to China in April, the Financial Times first reported. “Who was it that decided that the dollar was the currency after the disappearance of the gold standard?”
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