In the past week, Venezuela stated that they will no longer transact in the US Dollar and the Russians declared that their ports will only trade in Rubles, starting in 2018.
China is currently putting the finishing touches on a trade agreement with Russia and Iran, where they will create an oil futures contract on the Shanghai Exchange that is traded in Yuan and convertible to gold. Jim Rickards stated it this way:
It has several parts, which together spell dollar doom. The first part is that China will buy oil from Russia and Iran in exchange for yuan. The yuan is not a major reserve currency, so it’s not an especially attractive asset for Russia or Iran to hold. China solves that problem by offering to convert yuan into gold on a spot basis on the Shanghai Gold Exchange. This marks the beginning of the end of the petrodollar system that Henry Kissinger worked out with Saudi Arabia in 1974, after Nixon abandoned gold.
Last year the BRICS nations(Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) took a big step away form the US dollar dominated Bank of International Settlements(BIS) and the International Monetary Fund(IMF). They funded an alternative to these institutions by funding the BRICS Bank, with each country contributing a proportionate amount to the fund. The BRICS bank holds a basket of currencies to facilitate international trade, provide loans and emergency assistance. All functions that were once the monopoly of the BIS and IMF.
Putin had this to say about moving away from the Dollar:
“Russia shares the BRICS countries’ concerns over the unfairness of the global financial and economic architecture, which does not give due regard to the growing weight of the emerging economies. We are ready to work together with our partners to promote international financial regulation reforms and to overcome the excessive domination of the limited number of reserve currencies.”
Limited number of reserve currencies!
Putin nailed it on the head right there. US dollars are currently used in 2/3rds of global trading. It is the reserve currency of note and is losing it's grip on it's petrodollar status. Large oil producing nations are transitioning away from oil-in-dollar trading. This is a coordinated attempt to reduce the power of the US dollar by the international community.
Lone wolf attempts to dedollarize the oil trade have ended badly for the nations that tried to get off the dollar. Saddam Hussein switched Iraqi oil settlement to the Euro and his country was invaded in short order and he was killed. Qaddafi proposed an African Gold Dinar as an alternative and Libya was suddenly in a civil war, again, with him being killed.
The world has grown weary of perpetual war for the sake of dollar hegemony and they appear to be taking steps to counteract the status quo, yet the US continues to act like they have the only monetary system on the planet.
Just this past week, Mnuchin, the US Treasury Secretary threatened China if they failed to comply with US sanctions on North Korea.
“If China doesn’t follow these sanctions, we will put additional sanctions on them and prevent them from accessing the U.S. and international dollar system, and that’s quite meaningful.”
Having Mnuchin make useless threats against the US's largest creditor makes it appear that the US is encouraging the fall of the dollar as the reserve currency. Telling one of the spearheads of the dedollarization movement that they will lose their ability to access the SWIFT and international dollar system, is in reality, encouraging China to accelerate the process.
China and Russia are already reducing the dollars they hold in reserve and the process is speeding up, yet they don't want to crash the value of their dollar holdings by flooding the market too quickly.
Back in March and April of 2017 China and Russia established reserve banks in each others countries. The Russian Central Bank set up an office in Beijing, while China's most valuable bank, ICBC, set up offices in Moscow, to facilitate bi-lateral trade between the two, in their own currencies.
One of the main issues that has kept the dollar from being toppled has been the lack of a replacement that fill it's shoes. The Chinese Yuan was the most likely currency to fit the bill, but they were in the unique position of having too little debt to be an effective global reserve currency.
Since 2010, China has quadrupled their debt, even surpassing the US, to $28 Trillion dollars. This move towards debt expansion has brought the IMF to rebuke China's economic policies as being dangerous. It has also led to rating agency Standard & Poors to downgrade its credit rating from AA- to A+. S&P is part of the dollar syndicate and are merely using what tools that it has to punish China's growth of debt and in turn, the Yuan supply. Here's what the IMF had to say:
“International experience suggests that China’s credit growth is on a dangerous trajectory, with increasing risks of a disruptive adjustment and/or a marked growth slowdown.”
What the IMF fails to admit is that China has overcome the fact that they lacked a monetary base to supplant the US dollar as the reserve currency. By ramping up their debt, they have cleared that hurdle and now has the critical mass to actually be the next currency. They are also threatening to back the Yuan with gold, something the US stopped doing in 1971, when they switched schemes, moving off the gold backing and becoming an oil backed currency.
The dollar will not disappear overnight, but the majority of the world's population live in countries that are actively dedollarizing, the impact of which will eventually send trillions of dollars back to the United States. This in turn would spike inflation rates and make global imports for the US far more expensive than they currently are.
The US has used their dollar hegemony as a tool to force other nations into compliance since Bretton-Woods was put in place, post WWII. It has also been used as a personal piggy bank for Treasury to borrow as much as it needs to cover all expenses. The world has apparently decided that they are going to take away the US's printing press and create a more equitable method of international trade.
http://fortune.com/2017/09/22/china-standard-poors-credit-rating-downgrade/
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-14/oil-rich-venezuela-stops-accepting-dollars
https://needtoknow.news/2017/04/china-russia-replace-us-dollar-reserve-currency/