Professor and economist Richard Wolff said that BRICS expansion goes hand in hand with de-dollarization and the decline of the ‘US empire’.
The expansion of the BRICS group of emerging economies has coincided with the US dollar’s loss of dominance as the world’s reserve and trade currency. Professor and economist Richard Wolff said that the two trends were linked.
The rise of the BRICS group is directly linked to the decline of the US dollar says a top economist.
Economist Richard Wolff told Sputnik that the US displaced its mother country Britain as the world’s dominant imperial power around 1920 — and that history was now repeating itself.
“The American empire didn’t work the same way. It didn’t set up colonies the way the British had in India or South Africa or any of the other places,” Wolff said. “It had a more informal empire. [From] The way it had managed to control Latin America throughout the early years of this country to how they expanded and controlled the world by economic arrangements, by political deals, by alliances.”
But the US empire peaked around the year 2000, the academic said, and is now in “decline.”
“We lost the wars in Vietnam. We lost the war in Afghanistan. We lost the war in Iraq,” Wolff said. “It’s not clear what’s going to happen in Ukraine. But I wouldn’t bet money on a different outcome there either. And that war is a war between the United States and Russia more than anything else, with the disaster being concentrated on […] Ukraine.”
While the US leads the G7 group of the biggest Western economies, “there’s a different and other bloc, and that’s what’s new, it’s the bloc called the BRICS.”
Russia’s Mir payment system is contributing to the emerging global finance network, as Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro announced the introduction of Russia’s Mir bank cards in the country.