Brazil’s Nogueira: The BRICS Needs To Create Alternatives to the Current System
Aug. 13—Paulo Nogueira Batista, one of Brazil’s leading economists and a former Vice President of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) from its creation in 2015 until 2017, believes the BRICS summit held in Rio de Janeiro in early July 2025 “was a success, contrary to what many had feared (including me).” In an article published in the leading Brazilian daily Folha de São Paulo on July 7, right after the summit ended, Nogueira wrote:
“In the financial area, some important initiatives were reaffirmed…. In particular, it was interesting that President Lula reiterated that the BRICS needs to create an alternative currency for international transactions. This is a fearless statement, as he ignores—and he is right to ignore—Donald Trump’s repeated threats against the BRICS and against any country that acts to weaken the dollar as a currency.”
Nogueira explained that the proposal is not meant as an attack on the dollar. “BRICS does not intend to deliberately weaken the dollar, but rather to create alternatives to the international system dominated by the West, a system that is inefficient, politically manipulated and does not meet the needs of the Global South. That’s why we need to create alternative and independent mechanisms, while still participating in the Western system.”
He also praised the steps taken so far by the BRICS and the NDB: "Increasing use of national currencies in transactions between countries (bypassing the dollar), the construction of a new international payments platform, and the outlines of a multilateral guarantee scheme within the framework of the NDB.
Nogueira regretted that “there was no mention in the Leaders’ Declaration of the creation of a new reserve currency, which is supported by President Lula and other leaders. This is the most important step,” Nogueira insisted, because it is needed to facilitate both trade and investment that is outside the speculative framework of the Western financial system. But the idea “faces stiff resistance from India. And also from the group’s central banks, which get in the way a lot and grant themselves the right to interfere in geopolitical issues! Brazil’s Central Bank is one of the worst. Incredibly, it often behaves as if it were a separate country, an 11th BRICS nation. It needs to be brought to heel.”
In other writings, Nogueira has gone out of his way to praise the approach taken by former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who is now the President of the NDB, who intervened when she was head of state of Brazil to stop the sabotage of the BRICS by Brazil’s Central Bank. Nogueira has urged current Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who is head of the BRICS for this term, to act similarly.
As for the political obstacles within the BRICS, which makes decision by unanimous consensus, Nogueira proposed that prompt action is required due to the gravity of the crisis, and that "the solution is to allow certain initiatives to be taken forward by a sub-group, on a voluntary basis, leaving the door open for those who don’t wish to participate from the outset, to come on board later.
The problem is, really, that the BRICS cannot exist as a subset of the existing totally broken and bankrupt global financial system. Anything that touches that system, which is dominated by the City of London and its Wall Street satrap, is corrupted and will eventually be destroyed. So, the efforts both collectively and independently by BRICS members to create new physical wealth through investments that are made for different purposes than making financial profit for investors or for establishing control of physical and resource assets that can be looted for financial profit must eventually be undermined and opposed by the central banks that are players for existing global system, and by agents and operatives of that old system.
Eventually, as Nogueira knows but does not say, the question must be called: either you are part of an old and collapsing monetarist system, and will be dragged down by its collapse or you are the embryo of what must be a totally new system, founded not for financial profits for the few, but for the expansion of physical wealth for the many, as part of a new just, world economic order that must replace the existing decadent order of London and Wall Street. It is a fools errand to think that the BRICS can become a pathway to escape the collapse of the old order, the which cannot be reformed or fixed. Whether the BRICS wants to pretend that it is not a threat to the old system, it is already recognized as such a threat and London and Wall Street will use whatever power they muster to destroy that threat. There ultimately can be no accommodation with the central banks. The BRICS must offer their new path to prosperity to the national powers of the old system, such as the United States of Donald Trump, to join with them in bringing a new system into being.