BRICS foreign ministers met in Cape Town, South Africa for a two day meeting, ahead of the conference in August. BRICS is an economic block made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Two items on the BRICS agenda include expending the organization and creating a new world currency.

In Central and South America interest has been expressed by Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay to join. In the African continent Nigeria, Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt have expressed their desire to join. In the Middle East, Turkiye, Syria, Iran, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia have expressed interest. Afghanistan and Bangladesh, Thailand and Indonesia are also expressing their interested in joining the block.

The Indian Minister of External Affairs, S. Jaishankar stated the following:

Our gathering must send out a strong message: that the world is multipolar, it is rebalancing, and that old ways cannot address new situations. We are a symbol of change and must act accordingly.

BRICS is coming up with a formal document that will serve as a guide to expansion of the economic block as South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor stated:

More work will need to be done on this matter, it is still to be processed, and once we have a document that we believe offers clear guidance, we will then take that to the summit in August.

Fifteen foreign ministers were invited to this week’s meeting ahead of the August summit, including the five BRICS members and some of those who have shown interest in joining. Both Russia and China are backing the idea as a way to establish a multi-polar world and wrestle world economic dominance from the grip of the United States. China’s Vice-Foreign Minister Ma Zhanoxu stated:

I believe the enlargements of the BRICS will be beneficial to the BRICS, beneficial to developing countries, and increase the representation influence of this mechanism. 

Until World War I, the British Pound was the world currency. During the interwar years, the US Dollar rose to rival the British Pound.  In 1929 the British Pound and US Dollar made up 97% of the worlds reserve currency, with the US dollar outstripping the British Pound.  WWII saw the US Dollar rise as Britain fell into economic chaos with the debt it garnered during the war.

During recent history, the US dollar has been the world reserve currency, and the currency of international trade. About half of the world’s oil transactions take place in US Dollars. During times of crisis, countries purchase US dollars to lessen the volatility of their own currencies. Buy buying US dollars, countries around the world inadvertently fund the US economic hegemony. Back in the 1960s, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, then the French Minister of Finance, coined the term “exorbitant privilege” to the U.S. dollar position as a primary global currency.

China published a document entitled “US Hegemony and its Perils” in February of 2023. It stated:

After World War II, the United States led efforts to set up the Bretton Woods System, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which, together with the Marshall Plan, formed the international monetary system centered around the U.S. Dollar. In addition, the United States has also established institutional hegemony in the international economic and financial sector by manipulating the weighted voting systems, rules and arrangements of international organization including “approval by 85 percent majority,” and its domestic trade laws and regulations. By taking advantage of the dollar’s status as the major international reserve currency, the United States is basically collecting “seigniorage” from around the world; and using its control over international organizations, it coerces other countries into serving America’s political and economic strategy.

The Bretton Woods System saw gold be replaced by the US dollar as the standard reserve. Professor Richard Wolff, an economist from the University of Massachusetts described how the US dollar’s importance grew after World War II when the rest of the world’s economies were in a shambles. This is a long interview but worth listening to in light of Bible Prophecy – and trying to understand what is going on in the world:

So the dollar took on this fantastic global importance. It was “as good as gold”, because literally it was, it was as acceptable as a bar of gold would have been, and in a way that no o ther currency could be. It meant that all of the world people held on to dollars. That has to be understood for the enormous gift to the United States that entailed. Think of this way, if we buy something real from another country, French wine,  or Japanese automobile, or a software program produced in Finland, or whatever it is, we pay with little green pieces of paper, dollars, that cost absolutely nothing to produce. The whole world shipped goods and services to us for our use, for our consumption, for our use to produce yet more things, and all we had to give them was a piece of paper, a cheap little green piece of paper. Even better, they didn’t’ want to hold on the dollar in that form because it doesn’t earn you anything. So what they did, here we go now, was to lend dollars back to the United States government, getting a treasury security which pays interest, it is a dollar object, you can convert it into dollars at moments notice, but it pays interest. So the government has now encouraged our politicians to borrow because the whole world is accumulating dollars. We had that situation for the whole second half of the 20^th Century. It has played an enormous role in the prosperity and growth this country enjoyed, no other country was in that position. The British, by the way, had had that before. The British pound had been in the 19^th century what the US dollar became in the 20^th.

Every country understood that and every country was jealous of the United States, because they wanted the benefit of producing little pieces of paper and expending them for real goods and services, only to have the people with the bits of paper lend it back to their own government. This is a hussle that any other country would be desperate to enjoy. They’ve all wanted it, but they couldn’t do it because no other country was playing the role of the United States.

Now, once you understand the history, you will understand this is not sustainable. The rest of the world isn’t going to lie down and not try to replicate, to grow and to be a competitor of the United States. Western Europe even united in order to play that kind of role, and it began to be, that the rest of the world, to a degree, not like the dollar, to a degree began using the Euro starting in 2000. Even the little bit the Japanese Yen, because the Japanese grew dramatically in the second half of the 20^th century.

But then, the world changed. I’m exaggerating, but not by a lot. With the war in Ukraine, what folks have to understand, is as horrible as the military battles are in the Ukraine with the destruction of people and property that what we see there. That is not the main war going on. The main war going on is economic and it has to do with the United States doing something extrodinary. Obviously it cannot confront Russia directly, because that is nuclear war, or the risk of it, and fortunately people aren’t that crazy, yet. So how does the United States respond, well it made a choice. It is going to hit Russia with sanctions, it is going to use every economic power it has, including the use of the dollar in the world to go after the Russians, to deny them access to their own dollar reserves. They have dollars here in the United States backing up the Russian rouble as a currency. The United States seized that. The United States denied Russia the ability to use the dollar payment system in the world, called the SWIFT system. It was set up years ago to allow transactions in dollars to allow people everywhere in the world, it’s a major trading mechanism. They were frozen out of that, they were sanctioned, they were really, it was called the mother of all sanctions. It was a colossal policy failure. Why?

Because the Russians it turned out had a plan for how to get around the sanctions. Having been sanctioned by the United States many times, in the recent past, they had plenty of experience with dealing with them, and they learned from that experience. For example, refusing to buy Russian oil and gas, which was a crippling attack against Russia, designed to collapse their economy, because they are dependent on exports of oil and gas, what the Russians were able to do very quickly, was simply sell the oil and gas somewhere else, above all to India, and to China, the two largest countries on earth are now energizing themselves with Russian oil and gas. That was an escape beyond anything the West could do anything about, and the Russians have then expanded from there, and large parts of the global south are now busily trading with Russia and making up for Russia, for what the sanctions did against it.

But along the way, every other country has seen an opportunity, which I don’t think Washington foresaw. This situation allows everybody to stop depending on the dollar. They have two reasons to do it:

 One, I have already mentioned. They want for themselves the benefit of having their currency work as a global currency, so they want to eat into the privilege of the US dollar by advancing their own. 

But there was a second one, which should have Americans very concerned. The United States dollar was what what it was, it isn’t any more, but it was, because the United States promised the world, we will not abuse the position of the dollar. We will not weaponize it. We will not use it to pursue our particular foreign policy. You don’t have to worry if you are a little African country, or an Asian country or a Latin American country, that the United States, a big powerful wealthy country will use its global dollar position to get rid of one government and bring in another government. It won’t abuse the politics of it.

When the United States did that, demonized Russia and Putin, and threw everything they had at him, they were sending an unmistakable message to everybody else in the world: friend, foe and in-between, watch out! The United States can’t any longer manage the world the way it once did. And so, it is abusing its role as the neutral caretaker for the world’s currency by becoming a partisan user of its position. That is another reason, whether you are Indonesia, or India, or Brazil, to reduce your dependence on the dollar, for fear that somebody, if not Biden, then maybe a Trump, or whoever comes next, is going to be using this against you. So, the dollar, which was already shrinking because of the things I said before, the shrinkage is accelerating now, so that for the first time since the end of the war, World War Two), less than half of the reserves held by banks around the world are now in dollars, about 40%. It used to be 70, 80 or 90 percent, it is now, and you see it everywhere. One of the biggest steps, the decision by Saudi Arabia, a few months ago, to stop doing what it had done for the United States. Namely, declare that they would not accept payment for their oil, and remember that Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest oil producer, they would only accept payment in dollars. That was an enormous boost to the dollar, because everyone that buys oil, which is more than half the countries in the world, have to get the dollars and use them to pay. Saudi Arabia changed its position, signed an agreement with China, they are now sending oil to China, accepting payment in Chinese Yuan, instead of the dollar, and with that, kind of, it is the end.

This is part of something Americans have not yet wrapped their heads around. The American Empire, like every empire before it, is now shrinking. You know empires rise, they have a flourish, the grow, it is very impressive, and at their peak, they cannot imagine it won’t last for ever. It never has. Every empire, the Greek, the Roman, the Turkish, the Persian, fill in the blank,  they all went up, then they went down. The ride up, much more fun than the ride down. We are now in the ride down. We had better be very careful, because denial, which is the way most of America is so far dealing with it, is not a solution. It doesn’t go away because you pretend it isn’t happening. The dollar’s decline is literal barometer, week in and week out, of what we are seeing. The failure in the Ukraine is another one. You’ve got to see we didn’t win in Vietnam. We didn’t win in Afghanistan.  We didn’t win in Iraq. You can dance around it twenty different ways, but it is the truth. This is not an argument about who is the good guys and who is the bad guys, I’m just explaining, we are not facing a decline that is underway, and that is showing us its face, if only we are willing to see it. And we could have a “decent soft landing.” Empires do not have to go out in a horrible explosion, they can decline. Britain, not that they are a model, after trying twice to stop the United States in the war of Independence and the War of 1812, the British figured out we cannot do this militarily, and they came to terms with their decline and being replaced by the American Empire.

I don’t know what is coming next, whether the Chinese will be the next empire, or whether it will be handled in a multi-national way, and there is some evidence in both directions. But the United States is not able to do what it did and one of the greatest mistakes empires in the past have made is overreaching when they can’t do that anymore. My fear is, we are at a very delicate point in that point in that process, hampered by a denial of what is going on that periodically frightens me.

Well, we do know what is coming next, because the Bible tells us. The collapse of America as a superpower is foregone conclusion. Russia’s rise is a must. It is amazing to witness how the angels have been working behind the scene’s to bring this about. No different to how the angel’s Gabriel and Michael worked in Danie’s day to bring about the change of empires:

“But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia… and now will I return to fight with the prince of Persia: and when I am gone forth, lo, the prince of Grecia shall come.” (Daniel 10:20)

The struggle to unseat America has been accelerating over the past few decades.

Back in 2008 Russian President Dimitri Medvedev proposed a “Super-Currency” to replace the dollar.  Russia’s President Putin again proposed a common currency last year to replace the US dollar. Russia is particularly interested in this because of the power the US has to freeze Russia’s holding of US dollars. Over the past few years it has worked feverishly to replace its US dollar reserves with gold.

China’s article on Western hegemony went on to assert:

The hegemony of the U.S. dollar is the main source of instability and uncertainty in the world economy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States abused its global financial hegemony and injected trillions of dollars into the global market, leaving other countries, especially emerging economies, to pay the price. In 2022, the Fed ended its ultra-easy monetary policy and turned to aggressive interest rate hike, causing turmoil in the international financial market and substantial depreciation of other currencies such as the Euro, many of which dropped to a 20-year low. As a result, a large number of developing countries were challenged by high inflation, currency depreciation and capital outflows. This was exactly what Nixon’s secretary of the treasury John Connally once remarked, with self-satisfaction yet sharp precision, that “the dollar is our currency, but it is your problem.”

In 1991 the creation of the EURO, a common currency for the European Union was designed to upend US Financial Hegemony. It was supported by the Vatican.

The US dollars proportion of global reserves has sunk from 72% in 1999 to 59% in 2023.

Bloomberg reported this past week:

The US has brought unprecedented financial pain to bear on Vladimir Putin’s regime in response to the invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration has imposed sanctions, frozen hundreds of billions of dollars of Moscow’s foreign reserves, and, in concert with Western allies, all but ousted the country from the global banking system. For much of the world, it’s been a stark reminder of their own dependency on the dollar, regardless of what they think of the war.

The move to cut Russia from the US dollar-dominated global payment system has forced it, and other countries to move away from the US Dollar, and find alternatives.

This past week, the volume of oil India purchases from Russia outstripped the combined purchases from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE and the US. According to the Economic Times, Russia now makes up nearly 42% of all India’s crude oil imports. Russia is looking to fill the gap from European sanctions, and India is happy to snatch up the supply.   o the state-controlled lender Bank of Baroda, the increase is tenfold over last year. Not only this, but the transactions have been made in the Indian rupee instead of the US Dollar.

Bloomberg reported that Pakistan had placed an order for Russian oil in the Chinese Yuan. Bloomberg also reported that Brazil and China had struck a deal to settle their trade transactions in the Chinese yuan.

Last month, Russia and China agreed to adopt the Yuan as currency for the payment between Russia, Asia, Africa, and Latin America Countries in a bid to replace the dollar.

It has become a growing agenda for BRICS to develop its own currency amongst members so that it can trade without the US Dollar. BRICS has its own bank the New Development Bank that is looking into creating a new common currency. Many of the countries who are looking to join are reacting negatively to the sanctions placed by the West on Russia and the impact these sanctions are having on their economies. As South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor stated:

We had one of the senior executives of the New Development Bank briefing our meeting on work that the bank has been doing looking at the potential use of alternative currencies to the current internationally traded currencies, and looking at how we strengthen the arm of the BRICS Development Bank, and also ensure that we don’t become victim to the sanctions that have secondary effects to countries that have no involvement in issues that have led to those unilateral sanctions.

Bloomberg reported this past month:

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva lashed out at the dollar’s dominance while visiting Shanghai in April. Standing at a podium surrounded by the flags of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the so-called BRICS nations, he called on the world’s largest developing economies to come up with an alternative to replace the greenback in foreign trade, asking “who decided that the dollar was the (trade) currency after the end of gold parity?” 

He was harkening back to the early 1970s, when the post-WWII accord — known as Bretton Woods — that had made the dollar the center of global finance was unraveling. The agreement’s collapse did little to blunt the dollar’s preeminent position. To this day, it serves as the world’s dominant reserve currency, which has juiced demand for US bonds and allowed the country to run massive trade and budget deficits

Secretary Janet Yellen made in a mid-April acknowledged that “there is risk when we use financial sanctions that are linked to the role of the dollar that over time it could undermine the hegemony of the dollar.”

“Without a doubt, de-dollarization is accelerating and will continue for years to come,” said Vishnu Varathan, head of economics and strategy at Mizuho Bank Ltd. in Singapore. “The US made a calculated decision to use the dollar to inflict pain, and there’s likely to be long-term consequences.”

America’s use of the dollar as a weapon against Russia has had collateral damage throughout the world, and the world is reacting. Concrete steps are being taken by nations to unshackle themselves from America’s influence.

Retired US General Douglas Macgregor summarized the issue in an interview this last week when he stated of Russia:

Their economy is booming. They are doing land-office business. Their exports, particularly minerals and petroleum products, is at an all time high. There is a meeting that will occur later this month in St. Petersburg involving 84 countries. All of these countries are interested in what Russia and China are billing as gold-backed currency. All of these countries want to get out from under the US dominated financial system in the West. The only way to do that is to go to, first and foremost, gold-backed currency trading. The Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, obviously the Saudi’s and many of the Emirates have stock-piled an enormous quantity of gold. So, they are ready to move in this direction. This would cut us out of the loop, and essentially remove the burden of dealing with us through our system. This also means that they have stopped trading in dollars which means we cannot pass on our debt to them anymore, which is effectively what happens when they do business with us in dollars. Those 84 countries, plus Russia, India, China, I think they have a very good chance of bringing this off. So that is the first thing, the point is that economically we have not hurt Russia at all, Russia has boomed. 

Should the dollar lose its place as the world’s dominant reserve currency, the demand for US bonds will plummet and America will no longer be able to run up the massive budget deficits it has in years gone by. It is these deficits that have allowed it to fund the war in Ukraine and finance its massive military.

The news this week is very interesting considering Bible Prophecy’s clear outline of the latter days. The western-dominated world that arose after the collapse of the Soviet Union is not the picture that we see at the time of the end. The prophet Daniel clearly outlines a North-South orientation, not a uni-polar world:

“And at the time of the end shall the king of the south push at him: and the king of the north shall come against him like a whirlwind, with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over.” (Daniel 11:40)

This north-south hostility will eventually see the invasion of the land of Israel as the passage continues:

“He shall enter also into the glorious land, and many countries shall be overthrown: but these shall escape out of his hand, even Edom, and Moab, and the chief of the children of Ammon. He shall stretch forth his hand also upon the countries: and the land of Egypt shall not escape. But he shall have power over the treasures of gold and of silver, and over all the precious things of Egypt: and the Libyans and the Ethiopians shall be at his steps.” (Daniel 11:41–43)

The prophet Ezekiel defines the two groups of influences. The southern confederacy is made up of the Tarshish powers along with some of the Arab states:

“Sheba, and Dedan, and the merchants of Tarshish, with all the young lions thereof…” (Ezekiel 38:13)

These are the United Kingdom and its young lions (America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the commonwealth), along with many of the Arab states who comprise the geographical areas of Sheba and Dedan such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the Suni gulf states.

The core group of the King of the North is described:

“Gog, the land of Magog (the geographical area covering Ukraine across to Germany), the prince of Rosh (Russia) Meshech (The Muscovites) and Tubal (Tobolsk-Siberia region)” (Ezekiel 38:2–3)

Fighting under the banner of Russia are host of nations described in the 5^th and 6^th verses:

“Persia (Iran), Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet: Gomer, and all his bands (the tribes who migrated from across Europe and landed in France and German); the house of Togarmah of the north quarters (the Caucuses region), and all his bands: and many people with thee.” (Ezekiel 38:5–6)

For this confederacy to be assembled, the USA must lose its dominance on the world stage, making way for Russia to gather a group of nations under its banner. This will be accomplished by both military and economic means – the same way the US achieved dominance since the Second World War.  

The timing of the invasion is given by the prophet Joel:

“For, behold, in those days, and in that time, When I shall bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem, I will also gather all nations, And will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, And will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, Whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.” (Joel 3:1–2)

The area of Judah and Jerusalem was restored to Israel during the 1967 6-Day war. Therefore, we know we are in the “time of the end,” as all the necessary pieces are falling into place.  We are in the time of Russia’s rise. This will have drastic consequences for the economies in the Western world. We may experience hardships unseen since the Second World War. It is imperative that we put our trust in our God, imperative that we get our priorities right, imperative that we do not get caught up in the economic chaos that will soon engulf the world. As our Lord exhorted:

“Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” (Matthew 6:31–34)

May our Lord’s return be soon, and save us out of the turmoil that is coming, and usher in a righteous age, a new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwells righteousness.

For the Bible in the News this has been Jonathan Bowen joining you.