Global response to the dollar's weaponisation

LAST week, I covered how the dollar was used las a weapon and 'geopolitical tool of compliance, punishment and hierarchy; and this week I'll turn to the exodus which followed and is following.

- Peter McGahan

If freezing $300 billion in a country’s sovereign assets was the warning shot, the world has since responded, not in protest, but in action. (I remind you again to leave any political bias aside to capture what this means to your present, and future finances, and the source of conflict).

Middle Eastern elites, who've had their money parked in London, Zurich or Manhattan, started looking at those safe havens with fresh eyes. If Abramovich's billions could vanish, what was stopping the same from happening to them?

That message travelled fast. China didn’t wait for the world to change. It started changing it. In the years following 2022, Beijing accelerated its development of the digital yuan (e-CNY) and scaled up its cross-border interbank payment system (CIPS), a rival to the US dominated Western SWIFT system that allows global payments in renminbi, without touching the dollar or Western banks.

Russia, already bruised by earlier sanctions, had learned the hard way in 2014. By 2022, Moscow was ready. It launched its system for transfer of financial messages (SPFS), its own SWIFT alternative, added more gold reserves and turned toward non-dollar trade with India, China and Turkey.

In a move that would have been completely unthinkable a decade ago, Saudi Arabia and the UAE joined BRICS+.