Egypt is one of the handful of countries joining BRICS next year.

Friends and family here who don’t normally talk about finance are talking about it a lot. They see it as a pathway to escape the yoke of the dollar and American imperialism. They ask if this could mean the downfall of the dollar, and so forth.

I’ve been writing about long term de-dollarization for the past 3-4 years, and of course Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent freezing of Russian reserves accelerated it around the margins. I touch on de-dollarization in Broken Money too, in the “Heavy is the Head That Wears the Crown” chapter.

But like most things, people got overly excited by this process. Popular gold analysts were calling for a gold-backed BRICS currency announcement here in August, which of course never came.

Some major BRICS countries don’t even really like each other, like India and China. This will be a stepwise piece by piece process of closer financial and trade integration. Over time, countries can swap currencies rather than go through dollar rails.

It’s an important geopolitical process, but beware of people hyping it up too much or making something out of it that it is not.