**Escobar: Global De-Dollarization Nearing "Crossroads Moment"**

Escobar: Global De-Dollarization Nearing "Crossroads Moment"

_Authored by Ekaterina Blinova,_ (https://sputnikglobe.com/20230503/pepe-escobar-global-de-dollarization-nearing-crossroads-moment-1110062907.html)

**_De-dollarization is heading for a breakthrough due to rising global discontent with US 'casino capitalism'..._**

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_**"It's a gigantic snowball all over the world. We cannot even keep up with it,”**_ Pepe Escobar said in an interview with the New Rules podcast.

_“It's very important what is going to be discussed at the BRICS summit in South Africa. **This will probably be the crossroads moment where things are going to then go."**_

Escobar explained that a growing number of countries in the Global South were doing the math and concluding that the US dollar was not a safe bet. The combination of aggressive US sanctions policy and reckless government spending have dramatically reduced the greenback’s international appeal.

> _“If you want to analyze the patterns these past two decades, you need to understand the fact that, if you are rich in commodities and if you are a productive capitalist nation and you decide to issue a currency, it will be internationally respected because people will know it's based on facts, actual provenance, actual wealth,” he said. “That’s contrary to the system that we have now, which I have been calling it ‘casino capitalism’ for years. It's futures, it's bets, it's suppositions. It may go right or wrong. If you lose, you lose it all. The house mostly always wins because the house is the one who prints the currency. It's backed by nothing, literally, by a country that owes $30 trillion \[in national debt\] now and it will never be able to repay it."_

To make matters even worse, the US Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes has made borrowing in dollars expensive for almost everyone in the world. Prior to the Fed's move, Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned in January 2022 that the US raising interest rates could backfire on the global economy (https://sputnikglobe.com/20220921/how-the-us-fed-rate-hike-may-backfire-on-global-economy-1101050330.html) and especially on countries with higher levels of dollar-denominated debt.

The ongoing US banking crisis threatens to further destabilize international financial markets. No country in the world wants to "catch a cold" when the US economy "sneezes," as memories of the 2008 financial crisis linger.

> _"They say, 'look, why do we have to be subjected to this kind of arrangement?' And of course, before, as we all know, it was ‘the Empire of bases’, over 800 military bases all over the world, 'the power of the financial markets', 'the power of soft culture', 'the power of cancel culture', but the Global South is not intimidated anymore. I think this is the first \[time\] in this new millennium. We never had this before in the past two and a half centuries, at least," Escobar said._

BRICS Seeking to Establish New Currency

In January 2023, BRICS – an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – made a splash by announcing that it may soon explore the possibility of creating its own currency to by-pass the US dollar. The idea was articulated on both sides of the Atlantic: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov touched upon the plan (https://sputnikglobe.com/20230128/new-currency-zones-taking-shape-within-brics-as-global-dollar-system-crumbling-economist-says-1106787680.html) during a presser after his meeting with Angolan President Joao Lourenco on January 25.

On the other side of the pond, President of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva discussed the issue of the creation of a common currency for BRICS and the countries of Mercosur, a South American trade bloc, during his meeting with his Argentine counterpart Alberto Fernandez.

> _**"Why can’t an institution like the BRICS bank have a currency to finance trade relations between Brazil and China, between Brazil and all the other BRICS countries? Who decided that the dollar was the (trade) currency after the end of gold parity?"**_ Lula said during an April visit to the Shanghai-based New Development Bank.

According to Escobar, the formation and development of three organizations, namely BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Eurasian Economic Union predetermined the end of the greenback-centered world order. BRICS members are now discussing designing an alternative currency; similar discussions are being held in the Eurasian Economic Union; they should start coordinating and then this will spill over to the SCO, the writer projected.

The trend has already been engulfing ot…

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-global-de-dollarization-nearing-crossroads-moment