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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing BRICS currency, the BRICS generally and the notion of is this the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning. That's a quote from Churchill, I think. He was really good at little quips like that where he said, I don't think it's the beginning of the end, but it's the end of the beginning. I think we are kind of there. I do. I think we are seeing now; I would say from 2020 up to this point, we were sort of seeing things carry on in an international context when it came to currency, much as they had up to that point. Roughly starting last year, I think we came into the end game of the beginning if you will or we've ended the beginning phase of what may turn into a more multi-polar - there's a book out there, I'm trying to get a copy of it. It's called Multi-currency Mercantilism, talking about sort of a lot of people are saying oh de-dollarization and it's all going to go to the BRICS. No, it's not binary here and it's not zero-sum either. Is the Dollar forever going to be the sole reserve currency? No and in fact it's not now and things have changed a lot with regard to that in 15 years. I'm also not one of these doom mongers who thinks that "the Dollar is just going to collapse overnight, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, everything's just going to be wiped out." No, I don't think that either. It's probably going to be a rather nuanced, prolonged process as we see this shift sort of change. 

That said, at the same time I see a lot of folks out there who seem to think the BRICS is the end-all-be all and will fix everything. Look it's just another supranational organization. If you look their platforms and things that they have talked about, it's not far off of the systems we are used to, it's just different. It doesn't involve basically the West, the United States, the so-called Golden Billion - I think Putin came up with that term - basically describing sort of Europe under NATO and the UK and the Anglosphere and then the United States. Again, it's just different, I don't think it's going to replace anything. Again, to look at this in sort of a binary way or a zero-sum way is the wrong way to look at it. That said, there's a lot going on with respect to this and I thought this was worth noting. I found this on BNN Bloomberg, that's bnnbloomberg.ca, the article is titled: BIS Debates Ending Project Eyed by Putin to Undermine the Dollar. I want to note something here. There is a recent historical analog to this I want to discuss; I'll get to that in a moment but let me quote further. Quote: "The Bank for International Settlements is debating whether to shut down a pilot cross-border payments platform after Russia's President Vladimir Putin identified the underlying technology as a tool to circumvent sanctions and potentially undermine the Dollar's dominance in the Global Financial System." Well let's be clear, there's no circumvention of anything going on here. One country is sanctioning another; you can view those sanctions as right, wrong or indifferent but sovereign nations have a right to try to conduct business in the international world in any way that they can. So again, this is first of all framed as like "oh Putin is a bad guy because he's trying to get around sanctions." Well again, whether you like or dislike Putin, I don't want to get into that, let's just look at it from a post Westphalian sovereignty kind of philosophical perspective. They are a sovereign nation; they want to maintain their livelihood as a sovereign nation. They are going to do everything in their power they can to do that. So, to sit around and sort of whine about it in this framework of "oh he's not following the rules" or something. Well, we seized all of his reserve assets in Dollar denomination - not his but the country of Russia’s - I mean that's how this all started by the way. The weaponization of the Dollar which will go down in history probably as one of the great blunders in geo-economics, geo-politics, anything. It is a terrible idea. I mean it ranks up there with the Maginot Line, I mean it's just awful. That said, quoting further: "The mBridge project," now I've talked about mBridge on my personal channel, talked about it a little bit on here. I've heard it described less as a platform more as a protocol whereby specifically the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Thailand and the UAE's Monetary Authority in conjunction with actors in China utilizing systems related to the digital Yuan were creating this sort of platform protocol by which you can interact with the BRICS systems, with the digital Yuan but the way I looked at it is those three places are the nodal points along the rimland of what Halford McKinder once described as the “World Island”. You have Hong Kong, you have Thailand - or you have Bangkok specifically - and then you have the UAE. And again, these are all three sort of the nodal points by which currency capital, financial instruments, whatever, including gold would interact with this new “World Island”, Eurasian, BRICS industrializing entity that we're seeing rise. Quoting further: "The mBridge project - which promises to allow sending money around the world without relying on US Banks - was among these discussed by Central Banks and Finance Chiefs at last week's annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, according to people informed about the talks. Shutting it down was among the options, the people added, asking not to be named discussing confidential deliberations." The first thing I think is funny is this notion that the US just gets to unilaterally decide how the world is going to interact in terms of their finances. That level of hubris, that is historical levels of hubris there. Quoting further: "Agustin Carstens, the BIS General Manager whose term ends in June," I want to come back to that, "said on Saturday at an event of the Group of 30 in the US capital that "we cannot directly support any project for the BRICS because we cannot operate with countries that are subject to sanctions - I want to be very clear about that." Quoting further: "The US has been increasingly using the dollar's role as a key conduit of financial transactions worldwide to implement international sanctions..." Yeah, you think! They impounded all of the Russian's sovereign wealth in Dollar terms. They weaponized the Dollar, that has led to all of these problems quite frankly is leading to further problems. Quoting further: "..in particular after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This has prompted attempts to seek alternatives that would be safe from US interventions even though the dollar remains the main currency of international trade and there are little signs this will change anytime soon." Well define 'soon'. And again, this is all sort of written in an inevitability foregone conclusion - again the framing of all of this in this article is odd if you're sort of looking at it from 40,000 feet in the air and trying to be not biased about anything. I mean when was the US ever given the unfettered right to dictate how the world does business? And again, I know that the changing of this whole system is not particularly in the US's benefit. Well, they really should have thought about that before they weaponized the dollar. I'm sorry and I'm very serious about this. I don't like seeing this okay. I was born and raised in the United States; I'm an American; I love the place. I don't want to see it come to harm or come to a bad way or come to bad circumstances, but these are commonsensical notions. When you say "oh we are taking all your money and you have to do what we say if you want to use our money." People are going to try to figure out a way around using your money. This isn't difficult stuff here. Quoting further: "This hasn't stopped countries such as China and Russia from trying." Well they're not trying, they are building something. Again, the way it's framed, it's like they tried and failed. No, they are working on something - good, bad, indifferent - that is what they are doing. I was watching some of the footage from BRICS and Kazan recently and I mean they're not trying anything; they're working on something. Whether it comes to fruition, how it plays out, remains to be seen but again to frame it as if they are going to lose or something. Again all of this stuff from the narrative in the West really bugs me because the implication is the East doesn't know what it is doing; everybody outside the 'Golden Billion' in the West are all primitives and we are all out here clicking together rocks to make fire or something and it's really kind of ridiculous. Quoting further: "mBridge promises to allow sending money around the world outside of the current system of correspondent banks which is heavily reliant on the dollar and therefore potentially the target of US sanctions. Instead, it establishes direct digital link between the Central Banks of participating nations. The platform initially was developed by the Central Banks of China, Thailand, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates under the BIS's Innovation Hub..."

Yeah, for those that are unaware, the reason I talk about this is Thailand was one of the big players in moving this along and I expect will probably remain a big player in this because quite honestly Thailand's unique position in the world geopolitically, it requires Thailand kind of pursue some independent modes of maintaining trade and maintaining international finance independent of everyone. It's not an offense to any of her allies, it's just look we have to chart our own course; we have to maintain our own national interest, we are going to do that. Makes sense to me. Quoting further: "..and recently reached the "minimum viable product" stage, meaning it's ready for testing in the real world." So this thing could come online. Now it doesn't appear it's going to and I want to go back and quote something again: "Agustin Carstens, the BIS General Manager, whose term ends in June," - so he's the one that said we are not going to proceed with this. There's an analog here that I think people aren't really seeing. If you go back into the Obama Administration, Obama attempted to weaponize Swift which is effectively what Biden ultimately did after February of 2022 against Russia. Obama attempted that, if you go back I believe it was in some of the negotiations pertaining to France, Iran and some of this stuff. I can't remember the context, but I do remember they put pressure on the head of Swift and bear in mind, Swift is somewhat similar to the BIS. For those who want some further insight to what the Bank of International Settlements is, check out a book called the Tower of Basel (B-A-S-E-L) it is a great narrative history of how the BIS was formed. It’s a very interesting organization insofar as it's entirely extra-territorial, it is entirely a byproduct of treaty. Swift is similar. Swift is sort of an international organization. It was headed up by a person at the time that Obama put pressure on them and said "hey we want to weaponize this." They said No, that's bad for everybody - I think Swift is based in Belgium if I am not mistaken - they said No we're not going to do that. Then later on, they got somebody in there that would go along with them, and they ended up weaponizing under Biden and it resulted in my opinion the catastrophe that has befallen since that time. The point I'm trying to make here is people can change. Carstens is there now. As noted in the article he leaves in June. When he leaves, who replaces him? And is that person going to have the same feelings about the possibility of an mBridge type system after Carstens? Who knows. I don't know the answer to that, but I've seen some discussion on this and I don't think people are seeing the wider context or at least the analogy of how this could play out, I'm not saying it's a foregone conclusion, but how it could play out moving forward.