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James Schwartz's avatar

BRICS was dead the second it was created. Gold is a dead currency and only good for a safe investment. There’s a reason Gold was dumped for fiat and now digital currencies. I’ll go through the simplest for those that still believe BRICS is something novel. It’s cumbersome meaning impossible to make large transaction with. If you buy 100 billion of oil the security alone you would need to complete the transaction would run you in the tens of millions to keep it safe not to mention the Planes or Ships to carry it. Does anyone know what a BRIC is? What is its denomination? There is no bond market behind it and quite doubtful one ever materializes. Russia and China both require India to already exchange their native currency to theirs before any huge deals get done so India already is playing the bastard child here. How long do you think that will last before they leave? Too many variables exist to make this real. There are plenty more that require much more in depth explanation but this should suffice.

barnabus's avatar

Gold is not a dead currency. The problem with fiat currencies is their inborn tendency to be profligate and inflate away any sovereign debt. Which is what happening across the West, in countries like the US, UK, France and Japan.

James Schwartz's avatar

Do you pay for things in gold? Carry around a couple coins Eh? What store do you go to that accepts gold as payment? You’re easier to find a store that takes bitcoin than gold. Gold is a store of value and even then it lags the stock market by tens of thousands percent. It’s NOT a currency.

barnabus's avatar

You don't need to carry around gold. Countries can settle their net accounts in gold through physical exchange, and private people can pay in promissory notes pledging gold. This was totally normal before 1933.

But yes, if you do gold-based banking, the rules are different than if you do banking in fiat currency. In the first case, a central bank can't save you. Thus, there is no such thing as too big to fail. So a private bank lends much more cautiously, and to a much smaller extent over its capital base. With fiat currency, a bank can extend its lending like 10x over its capital. With gold, extending it more than 2.5x is quite risky.

James Schwartz's avatar

Look. The Fed should be abolished. Any country that doesn’t control its currency isn’t a country at all. Gold doesn’t appreciate enough to allow for the growth countries can face. Gold has been flat for the most part until recently. Yes, it makes sense when you’re talking about countries and their economies but settlement is a nightmare if the trade imbalance is large and what if some country lies? You’re still taking everything on faith and credit. You might as well be trading Wampum.

Nakayama's avatar

BRICS was centered on resource producers. India is not exactly one, at least not yet to the extent of Russia, Brazil, and South Africa. However, neither is China. Yet China is able to make its gigantic production capacity into a "resource". So can India. Other things aside, India could have better deployed its human resources. If sanctioned Iran can become a missile giant, there is no reason that India cannot do any better. India, given its current status, simply has a lot of work to do. Imperialists will not give India an easy way out, neither would fellow BRICS country, nor did India need an easy way out. India, and as many nonaligned countries once looked at India for, is for a chance to dig their way out with minimal outside help.

Owe Steen-Hansen's avatar

The problem has been that Russia has piled up rupi. Ad to that the possibility to barter.

barnabus's avatar

Yes, and there is a limit to what one can buy from India. With China, you have many more goods on offer.

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Oct 28, 2025
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James Schwartz's avatar

I’m just trying to clarify what its denomination is as when it was first announced that’s what they meant by it. It’s not going to matter once Bessent releases his Bitbonds. It’s game over once that happens

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Oct 28, 2025
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James Schwartz's avatar

Do you have understanding of the bitbonds? It erases the debt.

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Oct 28, 2025
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Walter DuBlanica's avatar

The world equations . RIC >>>> the USA. But Russia + USA >> the world. Trump needs to wise up that having Russiaas an enemy is bad for America. Who are the fools who keep wanting to hate Russia??? The neocon's their (polite) name for JEW. These neocons should be given a one way trip to their favorite country IRSREAL.

Feral Finster's avatar

Keep in mind that the US need only get China or India to defect and BRICS Is basically done. Neither wants to be the last defector,as they get the worst deal.

barnabus's avatar

US can't offer China leading edge Semiconductor production capabilities, and China is not much interested in other things. With India, Indians mistrust the West on Kashmir, just as Israelis mistrust the West on their inborn pro-Muslim tendencies.

Feral Finster's avatar

I dunno, Indian elites crave western tchotchkes, western credentials and capital. China wants access to western markets.

Anyway, it appears China and India both already folded.

Feral Finster's avatar

"The takeaway is that the US is indeed weaponizing energy geopolitics in a bid to break apart BRICS, which it might succeed with in terms of optics, but this won’t make any substantive difference in reality."

I am not sure what that means. Either it works or it doesn't.

Darras's avatar

Is it not AMC jesters who laughed, boasters, in singing that NEVER , absolutely NEVER !!!! proud Chineses and Indians will submit to the "ridiculous" Trump's diktat, and reduce their oil purchase to Russia?

NEVER!!!!!!

Darras's avatar

Just for remind, some few predictions of AMC:

- Russia will win for 8 may 2022.

- Never western weapon will arrive to front.

- If West provide lethal weapon, Poutine will launch a war against NATO

- the Russian proposition for peace in Istanbul are so scandalous that it's not true, it's an hoax of western médias.

- in June 2022: Ukraine army is erased , it will not last till September

- Russian will NEVER let Izium!

- Russian will NEVER let Lyman

- Russia will NEVER let Kherson

- Bakmut is a brillant slaughter of Ukrainians

- the best for me: as Russians send 7 times more shell than Ukrainians, they kill 7 times more soldiers.🤪

- Battle of Slaviansk have begun

- 17 times they said that Kupiansk is taken. And 10 times for Belogorivka.

-BRICS will launch a monney to destroy dollar

- 48 times: Ukrainian army is to collapse tomorrow, next week, month.

Ukrainians have more than one million death, Russians less than 100 000.

-Zircon changes everything.

- Kinjal changes everything

-Oreschnik change everything

- If Iran is attacked Russia will help military.

- never Russians will let Assad

- Poutine is not like awful Trump and he will never dirty his hands in shaking those of the terrorist who rules the country now.

- Armenia is Russians brothers for eternity.

- Aliyev is such a Poutine's friend that Azerbaijan will stay Russia brother for eternity.

- Kazan summit was a triumph for Poutine and Russia

And so much others.

Suman Suhag's avatar

It would have survived a global thermonuclear war even when nuclear arsenals were at peak strength, according to http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html comparatively optimistic scenario, projected by http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/about.html. A global thermonuclear war involving the United States, the USSR and China would have killed about 400,000,000 people on the first day, 5 August 1988 (7.77 % of the world’s population of 5,150,000,000 at the time). 450,000,000 people or 9.47% of the world’s surviving population would have died from injuries, fallout, exposure, starvation and disease over the next two months, and about 1 billion people or 23.26% of the world’s surviving population would have died from these causes over a subsequent period of ca. 9 months, bringing the total death toll by 31 August 1989 to 1,850,000,000 out of 5,150,000,000 people, or 35.92 % of the world’s prewar population. Life would return to fairly normal for the survivors by 2040, according to Johnston’s projection.

An even more optimistic scenario was considered in Brian Martin’s http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82jpr.html, published in 1982. Martin estimated that a major global nuclear war, one involving the explosion of most of the nuclear bombs that exist, would kill 400 to 450 million people, mostly in the US, Europe and Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent China and Japan, and that agricultural or economic breakdown followed by widespread starvation or epidemics occurring in heavily bombed areas could cause many tens or even several hundred million more people to die.

However, Martin’s article was published before studies about a possible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter hit the scene, so his estimate of the postwar death toll may have been on the low side. A nuclear war’s impact on world climate was also considered by Johnston (who estimated 1.45 billion deaths in the first year after the all-out nuclear exchange), but not the most severe predictions at the time, which he considered to have been evaluated and discounted by most of the scientific community.

Brian Martin’s greatest merit, in my opinion, lies in his having http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82jpr.html#fn14. However, I think he was way too optimistic in stating that a 13 megaton bomb (1,000 times as powerful as the 13 kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima) "would have killed at most all the resident population of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, say 250,000". The largest currently deployed bomb mentioned in the http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ is the Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-5, with a blast yield of 4–5 megatons. An air burst of this weapon over present-day Hiroshima, according to NUKEMAP, could cause 727,790 (immediate) fatalities and 643,570 injuries (many of which would lead to death). If detonated over Tokyo, in an area with a much larger population and population density, the same bomb might cause 3,990,450 fatalities and 8,892,100 injuries, versus 117,540 fatalities and 318,540 injuries from a bomb with the blast yield of "Little Boy".

Martin suggested that the idea of human extinction due to nuclear war may be perceived as consoling by who believes in such scenario. The prospect of death may be easier to contemplate than that of life in a disrupted postwar world.

charles leone's avatar

Trump represents the new British Empire. MI6 and Tony Blair directing the CIA in an existential war against the BRICs.

Walter DuBlanica's avatar

world equations RCI >>>USA . But RUSSIA + AMERICA >> the world.

those who hate being friendly with Russia should be depored to their country of choice. Having Russia as an enemy is dangerous.

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Oct 27, 2025
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Gene Frenkle's avatar

America’s low point was 2008 after 8 years of asinine policies of Bush/Cheney. Fracking being proven economical in 2010 gave America the opportunity to make the 21st century another American century. Fracking and LNG are the underlying cause of Gaza and Ukraine as Russia and Hamas were desperate for attention as the world was turning its attention to a new world order with America/Qatar (and Australia to a lesser degree) as its alpha.

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Oct 28, 2025
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Gene Frenkle's avatar

Do you know what “money” is??? Putin was desperate because his cash cow was about to dry up.

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Oct 28, 2025
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Gene Frenkle's avatar

LNG is undermining Russia’s cash cow—piped gas to Europe. China will never be as dependent as Europe was on Russia’s natural gas because China is building LNG import terminals to go with huge natural gas storage capacity and then China’s hydro is essentially natural gas storage and so are other renewables. But in 2022 Putin understood every year going forward Russia would have less leverage because of LNG growing in importance and so he invaded Ukraine not just because Zelensky was rooting out corruption but also because Russia was losing leverage over Europe in the form of piped gas.

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Oct 27, 2025
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Andrew Korybko's avatar

The "shadow fleet" can be monitored via satellite and estimates of the amount of oil being shipped can be made from there. What's most important to the US isn't the amount of their energy trade that continues per se, but just that it's apparently reduced, and it doesn't care about what each side's explanation for cutting down on imports might be.

TycheSD's avatar

This is why your commenters here predicting the demise of BRICS is premature. Most of Trump's deals (peace or economic) are just for show. Real and long-lasting changes or reversals to the trajectory are not happening. Maybe slowing things down slightly. But the multipolar world is forming whether the U.S. likes it or not. India and China don't want World War III, so they will make accommodations. On rare earths, China still has leverage even if the restrictions are postponed for a year. The U.S. is giving something in return for this postponement. And, Russia still has leverage on the battlefield. Russia's win will be a huge blow for the West. India's leverage is that they're neighbors with Russia and China.