Although it was apparently only just broached for discussion, “with no consensus,” at the BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia’s proposal for a new trade ("cross-border") payment system came under attack within days by NATO forces from Basel, Switzerland. “My Take: A Global Financial War Has Just Escalated on a New Digital Front,” wrote Alex Lo in an op-ed in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post.
The target of the financial war is not Russia’s proposed new system, but rather an existing system for digital-currency trade settlements among four Eurasian countries, designed largely by China’s experts since 2021 in coordination with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and called mBridge. Hong Kong, Malaysia and the U.A.E. are the other countries whose central banks are in the mBridge pilot program. It operates entirely among central banks, whereas what the “Russian Presidency Research” proposed to the Kazan Summit, is a system including groups of (trade-financing) private correspondent banks along with each participating central bank. Nonetheless, out of fear that mBridge might attract BRICS nations and become Russia’s proposal ("BRICS Bridge,” perhaps), the BIS has suddenly moved to try to shut it down.
On Oct. 28 the heavyweight General Director of the BIS, Augustin Carstens, erupted with a statement that the BIS, being an institution of the rule of law, couldn’t possibly help any country under sanctions. (He didn’t mention under rule of whose law these sanctions could be. And China was under U.S. sanctions when the BIS began the mBridge project, as Alex Lo pointed out in his SCMP column). Then on Oct. 31, in a discussion at BIS, Carstens made three statements—self-contradictory, but emphatic—of intent against the BRICS.
