In their push to dethrone the US dollar as the world’s largest reserve currency, the BRICS nations - 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 criticized this plan.
O’Neill: “It’s just ridiculous. They’re going to create a BRICS central bank? How would you do that? It’s embarrassing almost.” O’Neill, currently a senior advisor at UK-based think tank Chatham House, argued that the group of nations has ‘never achieved anything since they first started meeting’ in 2009.
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.
Despite the ongoing talk of de-dollarization, nearly 60% of global currency reserves were held in U.S. dollars in 2022, and 88% of international transactions used the dollar, according to IMF data. And Wall Street doesn’t seem to be worried about a serious competitor to the dollar either.
Source: finance.yahoo.com
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