The novelty was known two weeks After Trump fustigue the block members After, during his July meeting in Rio de Janeiro, they assured that They are advancing at work on a cross -border payment system known as Brics Pay which would facilitate commercial and financial transactions in local currencies. Besides, They proposed to develop cooperation frames and launch a new multilateral guarantee background.
“When I found out about this group of the BRICS, basically six countries, I tied them very strongly. And if it is ever formed significantly, it will disappear very quickly“Trump said on July 18.” We can never allow anyone to play with us. ” He also affirmed his commitment to preserve the global status of the dollar as a reserve currency and said he would apply tariffs to any country that is aligned with what he called the “Anti -American Policies” of the group.
BRICS weight globally
The Vice President of the Coppal, Francisco Cafieroraised to Scope that it would not be the first time that the US seeks to stop the progress of other economies in international trade: “The free trade area of the Americas (Alca) was an instrument created in the nineties to prevent the progress of China’s trade and India in Latin America, which the USA always considered it as its rear patio.”
In addition, he stressed The importance of BRICS globally, since “it expresses about 48% of the population in the world.” According to American Quarterly estimates, The internal gross product of BRICs countries is 27.1%slightly above the United States, which represents 26.3% of Global Total GDP.
In this sense, Cafiero remarked that “since 2020, but especially after 2022, with the beginning of the Russian war with Ukraine, Commercial exchanges between members and member countries of the BRICs were intensified “.
He also said that “the advance of trade, exchange volumes, investments and also the political cooperation of many countries in the world with the BRICs group has been phenomenal. Clearly, That is moving that hegemony that the United States held so much“
However, economist Luis Palma Cané relativized the issue and said that what happened is “the BRICS fell into the turned” of the tariffs. “I don’t think Trump has done all this Maremágnum for them,” he said. And said that eventually the United States should reach some kind of agreement with them: “He cannot make an agreement with the European Union and not with the BRICS. They are countries that together weigh.”
India tariffs: premeditated or conjunctural strategy?
Accessed on this subject, the Former Secretary of Foreign Trade, Marisa Bircherhe explained to this media “there is perhaps an intention to tension this brotherhood between the member countries of the BRICS” by the United States and cited the case of India.
In this sense, one of Trump’s justifications to impose 25% tariffs on the country governed by Narendra Modi was that “They have always bought the vast majority of their military team from Russia, and are the largest energy buyer in Russia, along with Chinaat a time when everyone wants Russia to stop the killings in Ukraine. “
The next day he mentioned the issue again, he added: “I don’t care what India does with Russia. They can collapse their economies dead together, for me. We have done very few business with India; His tariffs are too high, among the highest in the world. “
The former government official of Cambiemos said that “if she is going to do so with each of the countries (of the block), in a way What you are doing is break this intrinsic dependence between BRICS countrieswhich is not only a strategic commercial relationship, but also a strategic political relationship. “
For his part, the specialist in International Trade and Teacher of the UADE, Gabriel Torreshe said that “There is no decision to act on the BRICS as a block as a whole”since the reasons that the American government gave to apply tariffs to those countries are different, and considered that “India can be another threat in the economic sense such as Chinawhile those that could have some more political intentionality are Brazil and Russia. “
The challenge to the hegemony of the dollar
Bircher He said that in the US government “There is a look at maintaining the strength of the dollar against other currenciesmainly because they see that China begins to move forward with their own financial scheme, with an own financing bank. “
And he deepened: “Just as there is the IMF, China has its bank, which also begins to deploy in Latin America, offering them financing and economic collaboration.” Similarly, CafieroHe stressed that “from the 33 member countries of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), China is the main commercial partner of 30 of those countries. “
However, both were skeptical regarding the possibility that the hegemony of the dollar yields in the short term, with Bircher stating that The American currency “remains the strong currency of commerce” And Cafiero holding that “that will not change from one day to the next.”
Although it did consider important that “the possibility of change is already under discussion and that there is international trade outside the international currency is already a symptom.”
At the beginning of the year, The world payments in which the dollar intervenes were 50.2% of the totalaccording to data from the Company for World Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT). The next importance in importance was the euro, which constituted around 23%, followed by the pound sterling with 7.1%.
Source: Ambito
