The speaker argues that BRICS as a collective organization is “all talk,” and that after 17 summits and 17 communiqués it has produced exactly one operating institution, the New Development Bank, plus the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, which was signed but has never been used. He backs this with the group’s own documents, noting the summit communiqués recycle the same 12 commitments year after year, with the core paragraph from Kazan 2024 to Rio 2025 changing by one word and one comma. His conclusion is that BRICS is a US-dollar-based system pretending to be a dollar killer, and that the “secret plan behind the scenes” argument its proponents make is pure speculation offered because they have no evidence.
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The 17-year institutional record: Out of 17 summits, only two treaties were signed, roughly six or seven years in, and only the New Development Bank actually operates. Announced-but-never-built projects include a BRICS credit rating agency, a common currency, a grain exchange, a reinsurance company, and pilots like BRICS Pay, BRICS Bridge, and BRICS Clear.
The New Development Bank’s scale problem: Founded at Fortaleza in 2014 with $50 billion in initial capital, it has approved $36 billion and disbursed only $24 billion in roughly ten years. The World Bank’s IBRD committed $41 billion in fiscal 2025 alone, meaning the NDB has lent less than half in a decade of what the Western institution lent in one year.
The NDB lends in dollars: Only about 30% of approvals are in member currencies against roughly 65% in US dollars, with the euro and Swiss franc added in recent years, pushing non-BRICS currencies to about 70% of loans. Of the local-currency share, the renminbi accounts for 73%, which is 73% of 30%, and not one project in ten years has been done in real or rubles.
The CRA depends on the IMF: The contingent reserve arrangement, never once used, works by a member handing over its own currency and receiving dollars back from the other members, and 70% of the funding is accessible only via the IMF itself. The speaker asks how an institution dependent on the IMF can be an IMF killer.
A long line of failed dollar killers: Since the speaker entered the business in 1999 he has watched the euro, the Shanghai Gold Exchange, CIPS (where roughly 80% of payments still use SWIFT messaging), the petro-yuan, INSTEX (one largely ceremonial transaction of about $500,000), Libra/Diem (shut down in 2022 under US pressure), the digital euro, and mBridge (abandoned by the BIS in 2024) all fail to displace the dollar. Officials themselves undercut the narrative: the NDB president says local currencies are not alternatives to the dollar, India says it has never been for de-dollarization, Putin says Russia does not reject the dollar, and South Africa and Brazil dismiss a BRICS currency outright.
