(Kitco News) - Throughout the early months of 2024, the BRICS has been gaining a great deal of attention, first and foremost, by doubling in size. The intergovernmental organization uniting Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa welcomed Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates into the fold on Jan. 1, with the confirmation of Saudi Arabia’s formal ascension on Jan. 31 bringing the total number of member states from five to 10. Recent reports have 34 more countries expressing interest in joining this year.
Russia has assumed the chairmanship of the bloc, with the next BRICS summit taking place in the southwestern city of Kazan from Oct. 22 to 24, 2024. Since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has been operating under punitive sanctions that have frozen sovereign assets, restricted key imports, and locked the country out of the SWIFT international banking system. No state has a stronger incentive to push back against the existing financial order than Russia.
Not surprising then, that the international news media and global markets have been receiving a steady stream of headlines building up the bloc’s alternative financial mechanisms. These include the development of a transnational blockchain infrastructure, work on a new interbank payment and transfer system to circumvent SWIFT, and the many attempts to gain momentum for a gold-backed currency.
How viable are each of these initiatives, and what are their chances of success? And taken together, could these moves build the BRICS into a credible rival to the U.S.-led financial system?
Russia’s role matters for gold
Everett Millman, Chief Market Analyst at Gainesville Coins, believes that precious metals market participants need to take Russia’s chairmanship of the BRICS seriously because it is likely to impact the gold market… if it hasn’t already.
“I think it's significant that Russia is chairing the block right now,” Millman said. “It's a constant headline risk.”
Millman said the primary target audience for stories pushing the BRICS narratives of de-dollarization, SWIFT alternatives, growth rates, investment capital gains, and proliferating millionaires is neither current BRICS members nor the West, but the unaligned countries who belong to neither camp.
“I saw recently that Zimbabwe is making attempts to have a gold-backed currency of their own,” he noted. “I think that Africa is a really interesting fighting ground for this battle between the West and BRICS, because that's clearly a market that Russia and China are very good at, and very interested in cultivating to pull it into their own orbit.”
Millman said it’s a fact that the biggest countries in Africa have yet to experience the same degree of economic growth as their counterparts in the developed world. “That means there's still a lot of pent-up potential,” he said. “There's still a vast amount of resources there. They are clearly the audience.”
Future gold supply at stake
Millman highlighted that the mining investment community should be paying particular attention to this part of the world, as the future of the industry will be written there.
“The existing mines have a terminal lifespan and there's going to have to be new gold exploration in order for output to maintain the very consistent level it's been at for the past several decades,” he said. “I look to Africa as one of those untapped markets where there could be a great amount of investment, and new gold mines popping up. I do think that's a battleground.”
“When you consider how countries print money, how central banks are constantly growing the money supply, one of gold's calling cards is the stock-to-flow ratio,” Millman said. “The existing stock of gold is so massive compared to the amount of new gold that is mined each year, but that level of mined gold is very consistent. It tends to be close to 1%, so there's a one percent growth in the gold supply each year. I think that's an important element of this, that in the next 10, 20 years, we start approaching those barriers of gold production, or maybe the amount of new gold that's being added to our stockpile starts to dwindle.”
Millman said that Africa is likely the key to solving that problem. “It's an important place for nations that are interested in gold, their central banks are buying it,” he said. “They're going to want to know, where are the new deposits of gold going to come from? And I think increasingly that's in Africa.”
BRICS is a long-term bet
Jameel Ahmad is the Chief Analyst at GTC Global Trade Capital. “I'm still bullish on the BRICS,” he said. “I still see the exponential opportunities for this multipolar world that we're going into politically, and how, in time, the BRICS and its prospects can certainly change the economic order.”
Ahmad said that while he does expect the BRICS to become a global economic powerhouse, as was predicted in the early 2000s, COVID and the inflation crisis will probably delay that day.
“Of course, it could happen sooner, should the advanced economies aside from the United States continue their very underwhelming patterns of growth,” he added, though he acknowledged that the BRICS has its own weaknesses to worry about.
“If you look at the inclusion in the BRICS of the additional members, no matter which economies we're talking about, we are still talking about emerging economies,” Ahmad said. “Emerging markets carry a risk. They're not safe havens. You never know what might happen next. So that's still a disadvantage with the BRICS; despite its long-term potential, they are volatile.”
New payment systems
One BRICS initiative that’s been getting a lot of attention of late is the new interbank transfer system being built by Russia. Like China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payments System (CIPS), it is intended to be an alternative to SWIFT, the global standard for interbank transfers that Russia was locked out of following their invasion of Ukraine. But unlike CIPS, it would not be interfacing with SWIFT anytime soon.
“A big portion of the world is always under threat of U.S. or European sanctions, and it's in their interest to create an alternative system,” said Adam Button, Head of Currency Strategy at Forexlive.com. “The initial promise or purpose of SWIFT wasn't to be used in the sanctions system, and they changed the rules. My sense is that an alternative to SWIFT would have happened a long time ago if it had been weaponized.”
“SWIFT has been weaponized now, and that obviously called for making a new system.”
Button said he has no reason to doubt that these new systems will succeed and grow. “Transferring money from bank to bank isn't rocket science,” he said. “There are some standards to be agreed on and it will take some time. Then a launch is always going to be slow and maybe the system serves as more of a backup, or just for Iranian and Russian transfers or whoever else is under sanctions. But I think eventually this system will prove out, and a decent part of the world will use it.”
But even if these systems are operational and become widely used, Button said this could actually serve to reinforce the position of the dollar in international finance, even among the countries sanctioned by the United States and its allies. “Honestly, it may be more of an upside risk to U. S. dollars,” he said. “If Russia can move its U.S. dollars to Iran, then maybe it's a little more inclined to hold them.”
Millman believes that the new payment system would also have a silver lining for gold.
“If indeed there is an alternative to SWIFT, a payment system that is outside of U.S. control or U.S. banks or the dollar, I think that would probably on balance be positive for gold,” he said. “If there's one thing we know, it's that those countries have accumulated a lot of gold. They see gold as a neutral reserve asset, something that can be used to reckon settlement. Even if there are trust issues with using each other's currencies, gold can fulfill that role that the dollar tends to play as the intermediary currency.”
That said, Millman cautioned that these kinds of things take quite a while to develop, and the SWIFTies would also respond to reinforce their position in the market.
“I wouldn't underestimate the possibility of the United States and the rest of the West coming to some kind of adjustment to the system,” he said. “I'm not sure exactly what it would look like, but I certainly don't think that Europe and North America would take that development lying down. I think there would be some response, there would be some kind of tit-for-tat or back and forth, that would make this a very long process. I think we won't really know what the consequences are for at least 10 to 15 years down the road.”
Button said he could see some downside risk to dollar dominance from these newer payment system, but it would be very limited. “Say this gets built, and it works,” he said. “It's part of the trickle away from a U. S. dollar-denominated system, maybe an extremely slow erosion of the U.S. dollar system. But I don't think that's going to be a problem in my lifetime.”
BRICS currency
One of the biggest attention-getters coming out of the BRICS over the years is the idea of a shared currency for the bloc, and the project got a big push after Russia’s U.S. dollar assets were frozen in February of 2022. This could take the form of a brand-new common currency like the euro, possibly backed by gold (more on that later), or it could follow the current U.S. model where the strongest member’s currency becomes the de facto medium of exchange within the bloc.
While a multipolar financial system to match the emerging political order has its appeal, the U.S. dollar’s overwhelming power is not just exerted in finance, but extends very effectively into the political dimension, as recent events have clearly demonstrated. Ahmad pointed out that this creates another huge barrier with which any new prospective rival must contend.
“If you look at the weaponization of the dollar, how Washington is able to impose foreign policy, military power, and so forth, it all involves the U.S. dollar and its capital markets,” he said. “Capital markets are also part of the central bank narrative towards the financial system in order for the BRICS to become a reserve currency or a real contender.”
Ahmad said that notwithstanding his long-term belief in the BRICS, the bloc is not going to put forth a contending currency anytime soon.
“Firstly, it doesn't even exist,” he said. “It needs to have institutional depths of capital markets. It needs to offer different assets for institutional investors. And it also has to be something that central bankers are willing to provide their holdings in. All of those have been factors that have prevented other currencies from challenging the U.S. dollar.”
Button said that one of the problems with the rival currency narrative is that many people misunderstand what currency reserves actually are.
“We think of it as cash in a bank account, or physical cash, but currency reserves are held in debt,” he said. “When you hold U.S. dollar currency reserves, what you're really holding are Treasuries, T-bills. And the fundamental strength of that is the enormous liquidity in that market.”
Button said that even the sum total of the best non-USD international debt that already exists is unable to compete in terms of liquidity, and this includes the debt of the rest of the world’s developed economies, whereas the BRICS members are developing economies with far riskier sovereign bonds.
“There's nothing even close to the equivalent, and especially nothing that you can move across borders and get in and out of,” he said. “So for a BRICS currency, there's nothing that you could actually hold unless people were borrowing it. Even the Euro, as big as it is, is a problem because you have to go to national debt, and then you're worried about spreads [between countries’ bonds]. And none of those markets are nearly as liquid as Treasuries.”
Reserve currency constraints
The story of the euro’s rise and stall illustrates the problems the BRICS currency project would face. Europe’s shiny new common currency had a great deal going for it when it was launched: Member countries were close geographic neighbors. They had not fought wars with one another in 50 years. And they had already built a vast web of treaties and trade agreements that bound their long-term interests together. Can the BRICS members rely on these kinds of common bonds?
Beyond Europe’s borders, the global environment was also favorable for the euro. They were launching their new currency at a time of relative global tranquility after the end of the Cold War. Russia and the former Soviet bloc countries were new trading partners right next door with enormous untapped potential. And they had the international community, including the United States, fully committed to globalization and free trade. Do any of these factors hold true today?
The euro was launched on Jan. 1, 1999, and most would agree that it has performed very well for its members and on the international stage. It has retained its value against the U.S. dollar, and its share of foreign reserves places it second in the world, behind only the greenback. But even after a quarter century in a very supportive environment, it’s ranked a very distant second.
“At one point it was closing the gap,” Ahmad noted. “But an issue is that there was no standardization of capital markets in terms of fixed income. You could buy a German bond at one price, but then a Greek bond at a different price. Obviously, if you follow the history of the European Union, a Greek bond carried a certain higher risk at some point over the past.”
Ahmad said that once the European Union expanded from the core of countries like Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, and it started adding weaker members, “there were a number of different issues across central banking, across conflicts of interest, across standardization of instruments” which combined to stop the euro from becoming the world reserve currency.
“It's very comfortably number two, but the U.S. dollar equates with far more than double what the euro does in international reserves,” he said. “The U.S. dollar still accounts for as much as 90 percent of all FX transactions, which is a market that's worth something like seven trillion per day of turnover.”
“If you take that example of how standardization of different financial instruments and products was impacted by adding peripheral or less economically strong members into the group, just imagine what might happen if there hypothetically was a BRICS monetary system,” he said.
The greenback is an ecosystem
“An entire ecosystem is built around the U. S. currency that's based on debt, and to displace the U.S. currency, there needs to be a better debt,” Button said. “To do that would take a wholesale upheaval of all of these economies. It's not to say it's impossible, but really the only way it could happen would be some massive dislocation in the U.S., like a civil war, or hyperinflation, something on that level. Maybe some worldwide war, the complete cutoff of China.”
“At the moment, it's all completely make-believe,” Ahmad said. “I'm not saying something might not be possible, and I'm definitely not saying that the dollar does not need a contender. But again, it's been spoken about for more than 50 years, and all we've seen in financial markets is the United States continues to be worlds apart from any of its peers, in terms of the depth of instruments provided, in terms of the liquidity institutional investors enjoy, in terms of the central bankers following the Federal Reserve narrative.”
“The United States has managed to create a very complex system, and it's extremely powerful.”
And while it could be said that the U.S. political system has become more insular and protectionist over the past 10 years, when it comes to the financial system, Ahmad said it’s been anything but.
“You just need to look at what happened with the U.S. dollar, Treasury holdings, institutional support, and so forth during COVID,” he said. “Whenever there's a crisis in the world, everybody just flocks to the U.S. dollar.”
Ahmad said it’s the same story when you look at international reserves: When the going gets tough, the world buys Treasuries. “I always see these headlines about ‘the dollar holdings have dropped.’ If you look at the historical view, the dollar holdings are still much more than what they were 25 years ago. And at the same time, capital markets have grown, borrowers and transactions have grown. The size and depth of the world economy has grown.”
“Despite so much evolution in world finance, evolution of world economies, global trade and so forth, the dollar has still been able to scale to maintain the most dominant force in world finance.”
And it’s not as if all this growth is happening independently and the U.S. dollar has kept up, so much as that the growth is happening on the backbone of the greenback. “That's why I talk about the importance of standardization of products,” he said. “Because the dollar is a standard. It's set the standard.”
Achieving international reserve currency status could take decades, Ahmad said, as any BRICS currency would be going up against the U.S. dollar hegemony that's been in place since World War Two when it overtook the British pound.
“There's a kind of cottage industry of dollar decline, but it's just not something I think about,” Button said. “I openly mock people calling for the decline of the U.S. dollar.”
Gold’s role, then and now
The rise of the U.S. dollar over the past decades, and the concurrent rise of the United States as the preeminent economic and military superpower, coincided with the decline of gold as the foundation of currency valuation. As the ground beneath the global monetary system begins to shift once again, could gold reemerge as the key asset backstopping competing currency systems?
“It's interesting because, back in the 70s, the early 70s, when Bretton Woods collapsed, a lot of what was going on behind the scenes, I found from my colleagues’ research, was the U.S. was trying to keep the Europeans from coordinating too closely,” Millman said. “At that time, the euro didn't exist, but it was in the backs of many policymakers’ minds that Europe wanted to try and move away from being as reliant on the U.S., especially when we stopped exchanging our gold for the dollars that they held.”
If the countries of the world begin to coalesce into separate currency camps with gold at their core, Millman said the members forming Team USA will be a foregone conclusion. “This time around, I think Europe is much more closely aligned with the U.S.,” he said. “I would also say Canada is much more closely aligned with the U.S. in that regard, given the fact that their central bank doesn't own any gold anymore. Mexico also plays a significant role in this, considering that they do the majority of their trade with the U.S., they’re such a large manufacturing hub, and such a large source of precious metals as a natural resource.”
Millman said that the world of the 1970s was far more fragmented than it is now, and today’s interdependence would make the unification process easier. “It wasn't quite as globalized, and you didn't have a lot of the high-speed connections that we have now,” he said. “I think that the U.S. would be very amenable to Europe being united so long as it remains aligned or allied with the United States, which I see as very likely.”
Millman agreed that the events of recent years have made this even more likely, with Russia and China becoming more closely allied economically and militarily even as Russia threatens Europe with the war in Ukraine. He said this partnership has also had the effect of undermining the economic and political gains China was making in Europe.
“Trade with China made a lot of inroads into Europe, but with the sanctions against Russia and the trade war that Trump escalated with China, I think Europe sees that whatever connections they have with China can [change] very quickly, a wrench can be thrown into them, whereas the U.S. is the guarantor of its trade relationship with Europe,” he said.
Millman said that if this fundamental realignment between Europe and North America comes to pass, it will pose a formidable challenge to the growth prospects of the BRICS. “When you add that whole bloc together… I don't want to minimize the potential importance of BRICS and any of those non-Western-aligned countries, the amount of resources that they can bring to bear is significant,” he said. “But it's folly to think that the United States and its allies can't also bring to bear a similar or greater amount of resources.”
Old vs. new alliances
And beyond the measure of resources in absolute terms, these alliances are also based on the alignment of interests and effective unity within the blocs. While the BRICS may represent a rising percentage of global GDP, global population, and potential for global growth, the United States, North America, and Europe have a very long history of working together successfully.
Contrast that with the largest BRICS members India and China, which could barely even maintain cordial meetings with one another at the last summit in Johannesburg, even though it was very much in the interest of the bloc to project unity. The idea that just by enlarging BRICS, you get a more powerful and fully functioning collective of interests is farfetched at this point.
“Even if combined, they have his vast-seeming economic power, they are very fragmented,” Millman said. “They are not nearly as unified.”
And this issue goes far beyond the disputes of the day. Millman said the BRICS countries will likely never be effectively united. “You're dealing with very disparate cultures, you're dealing with a lot of history between them,” he said. “Everybody is aware of the tensions between India and China. Historically, those things don't go away just because they have a common enemy economically. And in the West, it's been proven to work over decades and decades. That's not going to go away overnight. That's going to be very difficult [to overcome] for those members who feel a lack of trust between one another.”
Millman said that if the existing financial order undergoes this kind of bifurcation, he believes North America and Europe will have the upper hand, including in precious metals. “Even if it goes to some sort of gold-backed system of trade, as long as the United States has the gold it says it does, it's just very hard to imagine that they would not have the leading position in whatever replacement system comes along.”
The East buys gold, but the West still holds it
This is a fundamental point that is often overlooked in the discussion of torrid central bank gold purchases and threats to move toward gold and away from the greenback: The United States isn’t buying gold to back their currency like other countries are because the dollar is already gaining against those other currencies. But if the U.S. wanted or needed to join the ongoing central bank gold rush, they would start from a position of overwhelming superiority from day one, with far and away the largest gold reserves on the planet.
According to the latest World Gold Council data, the United States has over 8,1333 tonnes of gold in its central bank reserves, compared to 2,333 for Russia and 2,235 for China. Combined, they total just over half those of the U.S. Even if we add the known sovereign gold reserves of the other BRICS members (official numbers for Iran and Ethiopia are unavailable), the 6,149.44-tonne total doesn’t match the resources of the U.S. alone.
And what if the U.S. is not alone? If we add the sovereign reserves of the EU member nations and Mexico (Canada has none) together with those of the United States, this ‘Western bloc’ would have a combined total of nearly 20,000 tonnes. That’s well over triple the reserves of the BRICS nations, and it doesn’t include non-EU Switzerland (1,040), nor the virtually certain participation of staunch military and economic partners the UK (310.29), Japan (845.97), Taiwan (423.63), South Korea (104.45), and Australia (79.85).
If they chose to do so, Millman said the United States could easily afford to use some of its outsized reserves to support Canada, Mexico, and other gold-poor allies in their transition to this new system, and EU countries have already been working for years to get gold up to 4% of total reserves.
For the BRICS and anyone else plotting the dollar’s downfall through gold, this could prove to be a classic case of ‘be careful what you wish for.’
Benefits of BRICS membership
If reports of the greenback’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, if the U.S. still has a ‘gold card’ in its back pocket, and if the BRICS are, by any measured analysis, light-years away from a realistic reserve currency of any kind, then what exactly is the appeal of joining? To paraphrase another popular American payment system, does membership have its rewards?
The answer appears to be yes. The bloc seems intent on carving out its own niche in international trade and finance, one which will provide an economic and financial framework firewalled off from U.S. coercion and control.
“China, if you listen to them, they're worried,” Button said. “The rise of populism in the U.S. Is a major threat to free trade, and I think everybody saw that. The BRICS may try to establish itself primarily as a trading bloc. If you get strong enough, you have a seat at the table, with the U. S., Europe, and BRICS.”
“I think the BRICS may ultimately try to put its flag in the ground as a trading bloc that respects free trade, but isn't too worried about human rights,” he said. “I think there's a space in the market for that. That's attractive to a lot of places.”
This comes back to the sanctions, because when countries are sanctioned, it’s for military actions or human rights violations. And while many countries may be disappointed in the direction the United States has gone of late, with its weaponization of the world’s reserve currency and its unapologetic protectionism in trade, Button said that BRICS is unlikely to offer a better alternative. “You get in bed with BRICS, it's still China,” he said. “It's not some open bastion either, right?”
If the financial system splits in two, America may still be the strongest side by any objective analysis, but countries with objectives that can only be achieved outside the U.S. and European-led international order may see no alternative to banding together under the China-led BRICS, trading diplomatic support for Beijing’s regional and international ambitions in return for financial backing that won’t be withdrawn when American interests are jeopardized or international norms are violated.
“They want a trading bloc that is liberal markets and no chance of sanctions based on human rights,” Button said. “That's a seductive sell.”
Russia has the chair, but China holds the cards
Millman pointed out that China has always laid out multi-decade plans to achieve generational goals, at home as well as abroad, and BRICS needs to be understood within that context.
“What is China's long-term vision with regard to building out these relationships, not just through the Belt and Road, but now also through other supranational groups like BRICS, like the New Development Bank as an alternative to the IMF and World Bank? It's almost as if they're just recreating what has already worked for the West,” he said. “They're like, ‘Okay we can play this game too.’ I think that's an accurate portrayal of what's going on.”
Millman said it bears repeating that China carries the most weight within the BRICS, by far. “Not to scoff at the size of the South African, or Brazilian, or Russian, or Indian economies, but let's just call a spade a spade: China is the heaviest hitter in that group,” he said. “If they weren't in that group, I don't think that we would even see a BRICS. I don't think it would exist without China at the heart of it. So it's worth paying attention to the steps they've already taken in that direction to try and internationalize their influence.”
Millman noted that President Xi and other leaders have used the big Chinese Communist Party gatherings in recent years to push these narratives and to make clear that these are essential long-term goals for the country.
“They often use rhetoric and make the point that they want to export Chinese style of government, of economic organization, to the rest of the world, following the same playbook that allowed the West and the United States to become such a big player on the global stage,” he said. “It's almost the exact same process, just replacing neoliberal economics with this kind of Chinese-style mixed economy of central planning plus certain free market principles.”
“But at the heart of that is gold,” Millman said. “Gold accumulation.”
Is BRICS driving geopolitical instability?
Millman said that China will continue to exert its influence in these spheres, and that much of what’s happening in the world right now is actually in support of these goals.
“A lot of the isolated geopolitical incidents that we look at around the world may in fact be proxy battles of the West trying to contain China's influence, or vice versa, China trying to assert its influence through other proxies, in a similar way that we saw throughout the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States,” he said. “I think there's no doubt about that, that those really are the driving forces.”
Even though it can be difficult to draw a straight line and say ‘Oh how does something that's going on in the Middle East have anything to do with China?’ I think sometimes if you really were to dig down deeper beneath the surface, there are some agendas or considerations. Either the West or China are trying to contain each other's influence.”
“A proven way to do that is to bog a country down, bog their resources down in an extended conflict,” he added. “And that's not even really that far beneath the surface between what's been going on with Russia and Ukraine. But I think that, when it comes to gold, it increasingly becomes this global and international battlefield.”
Millman noted that China is the world's biggest producer of gold. “But not all of that production is within mainland China,” he said. “Some significant portion of it is Chinese-owned mines in foreign countries. I think that's an obvious part of their strategy. Again, even though it's not quite so obvious, it's something that the West does all the time, not just the remnants of colonialism, but the fact that a lot of the biggest gold mining companies that operate in places like Latin America and Africa are owned by Western powers. It's undeniable that they are, in some sense, extracting those resources from those countries and taking it for themselves.”
He said it’s worth paying attention to who is in control of mining companies and the gold flows they produce. “It's beneath the surface, again it relies on quite a bit of speculation about the agendas and whether we can actually say that this is being done for any grander purpose than just profit maximization by companies,” Millman said. “But I do think that there is a larger geopolitical element going on with the Belt and Road, in the interest of securing gold supplies over the long term.”
China needs gold, the U.S. can take it or leave it
With the strongest currency, the largest and most liquid debt market, and continental access to energy and natural resources, the position of the United States over the next 10 to 15 years is unlikely to hinge on control of the global gold supply. The U.S. can treat gold as an investment vehicle, as a store of value, as an inflation hedge. It can buy and sell it like any other asset.
But this is not the case for China, and it helps to explain why the country continues to buy gold regardless of price, and to hold onto it like the life of its economy depends on it. Based on China's own actions, the only viable path they see for their currency to be strong and for their economy to be in a leadership position is to back it with gold.
Viewed through this lens, gold becomes absolutely essential to all of China’s plans. This includes the direction of BRICS, and it also applies to the common currency: If China continues to buy gold at their current pace while also controlling an ever-increasing proportion of gold production at home and abroad, then the Yuan’s role as the BRICS currency, whether de facto or de jure, becomes a foregone conclusion.
Under this scenario, China would hold all the cards, and could speak to the BRICS nations and much of the developing world from the same position that the U.S. has often spoken to the current international order: We control your trade by being your market. We control your resources, either through direct ownership or long-term lease agreements. You've got deep debt obligations to us through the New Development Bank, and Belt-and-Road. And we have more gold than you do, and we are amassing it at a faster rate than you ever could. Whose financial system do you think you’re operating in?
Millman said that while Russia will do all it can to use the role of chair of the bloc to its advantage, China represents the bigger picture within BRICS.
“That's what's more important here,” he said. “Obviously, Russia is front and center, not just being in the chairmanship, but because they're always in the news in the West over these past two years or so. But again, I think that's a somewhat shortsighted way of looking at what's actually happening.”