Putin’s plan to dethrone the dollar

He hopes this week’s BRICS summit will spark a sanctions-busting big bang
他希望本周的金砖国家峰会能够引发打破制裁的大爆炸

2024年10月24日 05:34 上午

VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russia’s president, was cock-a-hoop on October 22nd when he welcomed world leaders including Narendra Modi of India at the BRICS summit in Kazan on the Volga river. Last year, when the bloc met in South Africa and expanded from five to ten members, Mr Putin had to stay home to avoid being arrested on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. This time he played host to a rapidly growing club that is challenging the dominance of the Western-led order.

10 月 22 日，俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔·普京 (Vladimir Putin) 在伏尔加河畔喀山举行的金砖国家峰会上热情欢迎印度纳伦德拉·莫迪等世界领导人。去年，当欧盟在南非举行会议并将成员从五名扩大到十名时，普京不得不待在家里，以避免因海牙国际刑事法院发出的逮捕令而被捕。这一次，他接待了一家快速发展的俱乐部，该俱乐部正在挑战西方主导的秩序。

Now in their 15th year together, the original BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have achieved little. Yet Mr Putin hopes to give the bloc heft by getting it to build a new international payments system to attack America’s dominance of global finance and shield Russia and its pals from sanctions. “Everyone understands that anyone may face US or other Western sanctions,” Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said last month. A BRICS payments system would allow “economic operations without being dependent on those that decided to weaponise the dollar and the euro”. This system, which Russia calls “BRICS Bridge”, is intended to be built within a year and would let countries conduct cross-border settlement using digital platforms run by their central banks. Controversially, it may borrow concepts from a different project called mBridge, part-run by a bastion of the Western-led order, the Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

如今，最初的金砖国家（巴西、俄罗斯、印度、中国和南非）已经在一起走过了第 15 个年头，但他们却几乎没有取得什么成就。然而普京希望通过让欧盟建立一个新的国际支付系统来攻击美国在全球金融的主导地位并保护俄罗斯及其盟友免受制裁，从而增强欧盟的影响力。“每个人都明白，任何人都可能面临美国或其他西方国家的制裁，”俄罗斯外交部长谢尔盖·拉夫罗夫上个月表示。金砖国家的支付系统将允许“经济运行不依赖于那些决定将美元和欧元武器化的国家”。该系统被俄罗斯称为“金砖国家桥梁”，计划在一年内建成，让各国使用其央行运营的数字平台进行跨境结算。有争议的是，它可能借鉴了另一个名为 mBridge 的项目的概念，该项目由西方主导的秩序堡垒、总部位于瑞士的国际清算银行 (BIS) 部分运营。

The talks will shine a light on the race to remake the world’s financial plumbing. China has long bet that payments technology—not a creditors’ rebellion or armed conflict—will reduce the power that America gets from being at the centre of global finance. The BRICS plan could make transactions cheaper and faster. Those benefits may be enough to entice emerging economies. In a sign that the scheme has genuine potential, Western officials are wary that it may be designed to evade sanctions. Some are frustrated by the unintended role of the BIS, known as the central bank for central banks.

此次会谈将揭示重塑世界金融管道的竞赛。ZG长期以来一直认为，支付技术——而不是债权人的叛乱或武装冲突——将削弱美国作为全球金融中心的权力。金砖国家计划可以使交易更便宜、更快捷。这些好处可能足以吸引新兴经济体。西方官员担心该计划可能旨在逃避制裁，这表明该计划具有真正的潜力。一些人对被称为中央银行的中央银行的国际清算银行无意中扮演的角色感到沮丧。

America’s dominance of the global financial system, centred on the dollar, has been a mainstay of the post-war order and has put American banks at the centre of international payments. Sending money around the world is a bit like taking a long-haul flight; if two airports are not linked, passengers need to change flights, ideally at a busy hub. In the world of international payments, the biggest hub is America.

美国在以美元为中心的全球金融体系中的主导地位一直是战后秩序的支柱，并使美国银行处于国际支付的中心。在世界各地汇款有点像乘坐长途航班；如果两个机场没有连接，乘客需要改签航班，最好是在繁忙的枢纽机场。在国际支付领域，最大的中心是美国。

The centrality of the dollar provides what Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, two scholars, call “panopticon” and “choke-point” effects. Because almost all banks transacting in dollars have to do so through a correspondent bank in America, it is able to monitor flows for signs of terrorist-financing and sanctions-evasion. That provides America’s leaders with an enormous lever of power.

美元的中心地位提供了亨利·法雷尔和亚伯拉罕·纽曼两位学者所说的“圆形监狱”和“咽喉点”效应。由于几乎所有以美元进行交易的银行都必须通过美国的代理银行进行交易，因此它能够监控资金流动是否存在资助恐怖主义和逃避制裁的迹象。这为美国领导人提供了巨大的权力杠杆。

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the West froze $282bn of Russian assets held abroad and disconnected Russian banks from SWIFT, which is used by some 11,000 banks for cross-border payments. America has also threatened “secondary sanctions” on banks in other countries that support Russia’s war effort. This tsunami has prompted central banks to accumulate gold· and America’s adversaries to move away from using the dollar for payments, which China views as one of its biggest vulnerabilities.

2022 年俄乌战争爆发后，西方国家冻结了俄罗斯在海外持有的 2,820 亿美元资产，并切断了俄罗斯银行与 SWIFT 的联系，约有 11,000 家银行使用 SWIFT 进行跨境支付。美国还威胁对支持俄罗斯战争努力的其他国家的银行实施“二次制裁”。这场海啸促使各国央行积累黄金，并促使美国的对手不再使用美元进行支付，中国认为美元是其最大的弱点之一。

Mr Putin is hoping to capitalise on this dollar dissatisfaction at the BRICS summit. For him, creating a new scheme is an urgent practical priority as well as a geopolitical strategy. Russia’s foreign-exchange markets now almost exclusively trade yuan, but because it cannot get enough of this currency to pay for all of its imports, it has been reduced to bartering.

普京希望在金砖国家峰会上利用美元的不满情绪。对他来说，制定新计划是一项紧迫的实际优先事项，也是一项地缘政治战略。俄罗斯的外汇市场现在几乎完全以人民币进行交易，但由于它无法获得足够的人民币来支付所有进口，因此它已沦为易货贸易。

Mr Putin wants the summit to advance plans for BRICS Bridge, a payments system that would use digital money issued by central banks and backed by fiat currencies. This would place central banks, not correspondent banks with access to the dollar clearing system in America, in the middle of cross-border transactions. The biggest advantage for him is that no one country could impose sanctions on another. Chinese state media say that the new BRICS plan “is likely to draw on the lessons learned” from mBridge, an experimental payments platform developed by the BIS alongside the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates (see chart).

普京希望峰会推进金砖国家桥的计划，金砖国家桥是一个使用央行发行的数字货币并以法定货币支持的支付系统。这将使中央银行（而不是能够进入美国美元清算系统的代理银行）参与跨境交易。对他来说最大的优势是没有一个国家可以对另一个国家实施制裁。ZG官方媒体称，新的金砖国家计划“可能会借鉴 mBridge 的经验教训”，mBridge 是国际清算银行与中国、香港、泰国和阿拉伯联合酋长国央行共同开发的实验性支付平台。

That BIS experiment was innocent in design and initiated in 2019, before Russia’s full-scale invasion. It has been stunningly successful, according to several people involved in the project. It could cut transaction times from days to seconds and transaction costs to almost nothing. In June the BIS said mBridge had reached “minimum viable product stage” and Saudi Arabia’s central bank joined as a fifth partner in the scheme. This week an Emirati official said the platform has since processed hundreds of transactions worth billions of dollars in total—a figure that is growing rapidly. By creating a system that could be more efficient than the current one—and which would weaken the dominance of the dollar—the BIS has unwittingly stepped into a geopolitical minefield.

BIS 的这项实验在设计上是无辜的，并于 2019 年俄罗斯全面入侵之前启动。据参与该项目的几位人士称，该项目取得了惊人的成功。它可以将交易时间从几天缩短到几秒钟，并且交易成本几乎为零。6 月，国际清算银行表示 mBridge 已达到“最低可行产品阶段”，沙特阿拉伯中央银行作为第五个合作伙伴加入该计划。本周，一位阿联酋官员表示，该平台已处理了数百笔交易，总价值达数十亿美元，而且这一数字还在迅速增长。通过创建一个比当前系统更高效的体系（并且会削弱美元的主导地位），国际清算银行无意中踏入了地缘政治雷区。

“If someone is transacting outside of the dollar system for political reasons, you want that to be more expensive for them than the dollar system,” says Jay Shambaugh, a Treasury Department official. The efficiency gains of new kinds of digital money may erode the use of the dollar in cross-border trade, according to the Fed. Reciprocally they could boost China’s currency. Speaking to bankers and officials about mBridge in September, a Hong Kong official said it “provides another opportunity to allow the easier use of the renminbi in cross-border payment, and Hong Kong as an offshore hub stands to benefit”.

“如果有人出于政治原因在美元体系之外进行交易，你会希望这对他们来说比美元体系更昂贵，”财政部官员杰伊·香博(Jay Shambaugh)表示。美联储表示，新型数字货币的效率提升可能会削弱美元在跨境贸易中的使用。相反，它们可以提振人民币汇率。一位香港官员在 9 月份向银行家和官员谈及 mBridge 时表示，它“提供了另一个机会，让人民币在跨境支付中更容易使用，香港作为离岸中心将从中受益”。

大多数国际支付都是以美元为单位，并且通常通过一系列中间银行缓慢进行。相反，mBridge 项目依赖于中央银行，并赋予它们对国内银行以及外国银行使用其数字货币的可见性和一定的控制权。第一步，发送跨境支付的银行将普通货币（A$）交换为中央银行直接发行的数字货币（eA$）。在第二步中，银行将其交易为外国数字货币（eB$），并在第三步中发送。外国银行将在第四步中将其兑换回普通货币。

Is it possible that mBridge’s concepts and code might be replicated by the BRICS, China or Russia? The BIS doubtless views mBridge as a joint project and believes that it has the ultimate say over who can join. Yet some Western officials say that participants in the mBridge trial may be able to pass on the intellectual capital it involves to others, including participants in the BRICS Bridge. According to multiple sources, China has taken a lead on the software and code behind the mBridge project. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the central bank, leads its technology subcommittee and, according to comments made by a BIS official in 2023, its digital ledger “was built by” the PBOC. Perhaps this technology and know-how could be used to build a parallel system beyond the reach of the BIS or its Western members. The BIS has declined to comment on any similarities between its experiment and Mr Putin’s plan.

mBridge的概念和代码是否有可能被金砖国家、中国或俄罗斯复制？毫无疑问，BIS 将 mBridge 视为一个联合项目，并相信它对谁可以加入拥有最终决定权。然而一些西方官员表示，mBridge 试验的参与者或许能够将其涉及的智力资本传递给其他人，包括金砖国家大桥的参与者。据多个消息来源称，中国在 mBridge 项目背后的软件和代码方面处于领先地位。中国人民银行 (PBOC) 领导其技术小组委员会，根据国际清算银行 (BIS) 官员 2023 年的评论，其数字账本“是由中国人民银行建立的”。也许这项技术和专业知识可用于建立一个超出国际清算银行或其西方成员能力范围的并行系统。国际清算银行拒绝就其实验与普京计划之间的任何相似之处发表评论。

The BRICS’s foray into the payments race reveals the new geopolitical challenges facing multilateral organisations. At a meeting of the G20 group of large economies in 2020, the BIS was given the job of both improving the existing system and, at China’s urging, of experimenting with digital currencies. Earlier this year Agustín Carstens, its boss, called for “entirely new architectures” and a “fundamental rethink of the financial system”. As different members of the organisation have rival objectives, staying above the fray is getting harder. The world has become more difficult to navigate, acknowledges Cecilia Skingsley, the boss of the BIS Innovation Hub. But she says the BIS still has a role to play in solving problems for all countries “almost independent of what other kind of agenda they might have”.

金砖国家进军支付竞赛揭示了多边组织面临的新地缘政治挑战。在 2020 年举行的 G20 大型经济体会议上，国际清算银行的任务是改进现有系统，并在中国的敦促下试验数字货币。今年早些时候，其老板阿古斯丁·卡斯滕斯（Agustín Carstens）呼吁“全新的架构”和“对金融体系进行根本性的重新思考”。由于该组织的不同成员有着相互竞争的目标，保持在竞争之外变得越来越困难。BIS 创新中心的老板塞西莉亚·斯金斯利 (Cecilia Skingsley) 承认，世界变得更加难以驾驭。但她表示，国际清算银行在为所有国家解决问题方面仍然可以发挥作用，“几乎独立于他们可能有什么其他议程”。

One option for America and its allies is to try to hobble new payments systems that compete with the dollar. Western officials have warned the BIS that the project could be misused by countries with malign motives. The BIS has since slowed down its work on mBridge, according to some former staff and advisers, and is unlikely to admit any new members to the project.

美国及其盟国的一个选择是试图阻碍与美元竞争的新支付系统。西方官员警告国际清算银行，该项目可能会被怀有恶意的国家滥用。据一些前工作人员和顾问称，国际清算银行此后放慢了 mBridge 的工作，并且不太可能接纳任何新成员加入该项目。

Another option is to improve the dollar-based system so that it is as efficient as new rivals. In April the New York Fed joined six other central banks in a BIS project aimed at making the existing system faster and cheaper. The Federal Reserve may also link its domestic instant-payments system with those in other countries. SWIFT plans to conduct trials of digital transactions next year, leveraging some of its incumbent advantages including strong network effects and trust, says Tom Zschach, its innovation chief.

另一种选择是改进以美元为基础的体系，使其与新竞争对手一样高效。4 月份，纽约联储与其他六家央行一起参与了国际清算银行 (BIS) 项目，旨在使现有系统更快、更便宜。美联储还可能将其国内即时支付系统与其他国家的即时支付系统连接起来。SWIFT 创新主管 Tom Zschach 表示，该公司计划明年利用其现有的一些优势（包括强大的网络效应和信任）进行数字交易试验。

Any rival BRICS payments system will still face huge challenges. Guaranteeing liquidity will be difficult or require large implicit government subsidies. If the underlying flows of capital and trade between two countries are imbalanced, which they usually are, they will have to accumulate assets or liabilities in each other’s currencies, which may be unappealing. And to scale up a digital-currency system, countries must agree on complex rules to govern settlement and financial crime. Such unanimity is unlikely to win the day in Kazan.

任何竞争对手的金砖国家支付系统仍将面临巨大挑战。保证流动性将很困难，或者需要大量隐性政府补贴。如果两国之间资本和贸易的基本流动不平衡（通常情况下就是这样），它们将不得不以彼此的货币积累资产或负债，这可能没有吸引力。为了扩大数字货币系统的规模，各国必须就管理结算和金融犯罪的复杂规则达成一致。这种一致不太可能在喀山获胜。

For all that, the BRICS scheme may have momentum. There is a broad consensus that current cross-border payments are too slow and expensive. Although rich countries tend to focus on making it quicker, many others want to overturn the current system entirely. At least 134 central banks are experimenting with digital money, mostly for domestic purposes, reckons the Atlantic Council, a think-tank in Washington. The number working on such currencies for cross-border transactions has doubled to 13 since Russia invaded Ukraine.

尽管如此，金砖国家计划可能仍有动力。人们普遍认为，当前的跨境支付速度太慢且成本高昂。尽管富裕国家往往专注于加快进程，但许多其他国家希望完全推翻现行体系。华盛顿智库大西洋理事会估计，至少有 134 家央行正在试验数字货币，主要用于国内目的。自俄罗斯入侵乌克兰以来，使用此类货币进行跨境交易的数量已增加一倍，达到 13 个。

This week’s BRICS summit is no Bretton Woods. All that Russia and its pals have to do is move a relatively small number of sanctions-related transactions beyond America’s reach. Still, many are aiming higher. Next year the BRICS summit will be held in Brazil, chaired by its president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who fulminates over the power of the greenback. “Every night I ask myself why all countries have to base their trade on the dollar,” he said last year. “Who was it that decided?” ■

本周的金砖国家峰会不是布雷顿森林体系。俄罗斯及其盟友所要做的就是将相对少量的与制裁相关的交易移至美国的控制范围之外。尽管如此，许多人的目标更高。明年，金砖国家峰会将在巴西举行，由巴西总统路易斯·伊纳西奥·卢拉·达席尔瓦主持，他对美元的权力进行了猛烈抨击。“每天晚上我都会问自己，为什么所有国家都必须以美元为基础进行贸易，”他去年表示。“是谁决定的？” ■