- According to Jim O’Neil, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, the global dominance of the United States dollar needs to be challenged but the BRICS movement has to detail clear goals that surpass the G20 organization.
- With the United States dollar heavily weaponized in the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Israel through sanctions, the adoption of Bitcoin as a global reserve currency is imminent in the coming years.
The growth of the BRICS movement has undeniably shifted global geopolitical power from dollar reliance in the past year. According to Jim O’Neill, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and a former UK treasury minister who is currently a member of the Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development, in a recent opinionated piece, the global reliance on the United States dollar is not healthy for the other first world countries hence making the BRICS alliance a crucial element of balance.
Notably, O’Neil coined the BRIC acronym back in 2001 with a primary point of advocating for the largest emerging economies.
Undeniably, the United States dollar has significantly been challenged by other global currencies as more countries opt to settle international trades with their respective currencies. For instance, Russia and China have used the United States dollar as an intermediary currency, which is expected to increase the value of their respective currencies. Additionally, India and Brazil have been increasing their use of respective currencies to settle international trades, a move that has significantly widened de-dollarization. O’Neil noted;
It is true that in terms of purchasing power parity, the BRICS are slightly larger than the G7. But, because their currencies trade at prices far below their PPP-implied levels, the group remains significantly smaller than its advanced-economy counterpart, when measured in current nominal US dollars,
Bitcoin as a Better Option
With only 21 million Bitcoins ever to exist and over 15 million held by long-term holders, more investors are slowly walking away from fiat currencies to Bitcoin. Moreover, the high inflation of top global economies has led to hyperinflation in developing and third-world countries, which has made Bitcoin and other digital assets more attractive.
In the past three years, Bitcoin has outshined traditional investment products like treasury bonds, stock indexes, and precious metals by a huge margin. As a result, top-rated fund managers have been silently accumulating Bitcoins through strategic investment in mining companies and DeFi platforms.
The notion that the BRICS movement could create a common currency to counter the United States dollar is not expected to help investors fight the high rate of inflation like Bitcoin. As a result, O’Neil highlighted that global emerging economies need to rewire their agenda of de-dollarization in order not to miss the point like the Eurozone.
One big issue is the dominance of the US dollar. It is not especially healthy for the world to be so dependent on the dollar and, as a corollary, on the US Federal Reserve’s monetary policy,
