Vincient Arnold is a researcher at the Yale Program on Financial Stability and publishes research notes on his blog, Discursive Etc. The views expressed herein are his own.
The United States would seriously like to maintain the supremacy of the US dollar as an international reserve currency, and BRICS coin — unseriously — would like to replace it.
Whatever the (lack of) merits of a BRICS coin, there are real, lurking challenges to the dollar’s role abroad. A forward-looking response to the dollar threats of tomorrow, not just today, would be to lead the pack in the development of a cross-border wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC): ie, the offshore digital dollar. However, President Trump just signed an executive order banning the development of all CBDCs in the US, while supporting the development of stablecoins.
Now, I have no qualms with the value of…
