BRICs Mull Bank to Bypass World Bank and IMF

Developing economies represented by the BRICs or Brazil Russia India and China, a popular acronym coined by Goldman Sach analyst Jim O’Neill, have been reported as intending to establish their own multilateral bank to bypass or breakout from the clutches of the influences of the US and the World Bank-IMF cabal. 

From Bloomberg:

The biggest emerging markets are uniting to tackle under-development and currency volatility with plans to set up institutions that encroach on the roles of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

The leaders of the so-called BRICS nations -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- are set to approve the establishment of a new development bank during an annual summit that starts today in the eastern South African city of Durban, officials from all five nations say. They will also discuss pooling foreign-currency reserves to ward off balance of payments or currency crises.

“The deepest rationale for the BRICS is almost certainly the creation of new Bretton Woods-type institutions that are inclined toward the developing world,” Martyn Davies, chief executive officer of Johannesburg-based Frontier Advisory, which provides research on emerging markets, said in a phone interview. “There’s a shift in power from the traditional to the emerging world. There is a lot of geo-political concern about this shift in the western world.”

The growing role of emerging markets suggests of a commensurate expansion in geopolitical clout. From the same article:

The BRICS nations, which have combined foreign-currency reserves of $4.4 trillion and account for 43 percent of the world’s population, are seeking greater sway in global finance to match their rising economic power. They have called for an overhaul of management of the World Bank and IMF, which were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, and oppose the practice of their respective presidents being drawn from the U.S. and Europe…

Trade within the group surged to $282 billion last year from $27 billion in 2002 and may reach $500 billion by 2015, according to data from Brazil’s government. 

But such plans are still on the drawing board…

While BRICS leaders may approve the creation of a development bank in principle at the summit, there’s still disagreement on how it should be funded and operated.

There is more than meets the eye from this development.

 

The BRICs has been expressing apprehension over central bank 'credit easing policies' adapted or imbued by developed economies led by the US Federal Reserve. 

Russia’s Putin calls Bernanke’s QEs as “hooliganism”. Brazil has blamed the Fed for inciting a currency war, and so with China’s censure of QE. 

And partly in response and also in part to promote advancing her geopolitical role, China has been promoting the yuan, via bilateral trade arrangements to the BRICs and the ASEAN.

BRICs along with other emerging markets have been major buyers of gold

Emerging markets led by the BRICs dominated buying in 2012 according to the Bullion Street:

Central bank buying lifted gold last year and is likely to do so this year as more and more emerging market central banks have become first time buyers in recent years.

Observers said central banks across the globe collectively bought more gold than they had previously over 40 years. The buyers were not the usual central bank suspects among the old world European nations, but emerging economies.

And also in 2011 (chart from Reuters)

And recent events in Cyprus only exhibits of the rapidly deteriorating state of the current central bank based fiat money system. 

As Tim Price at the Sovereign Man aptly commented

It matters because the inept handling of its crisis last week threw one facet of modern banking into sharp relief: if a deposit guarantee is seen to be fraudulent or sufficiently fragile to be easily smashed by politicians, then confidence in banks, and in unbacked paper currency itself, will be vulnerable to an unpredictable run.

So the BRICs dissension over the current system has been prompting them to "diversify" (euphemism for acquiring insurance through gold purchases), as well as, to work on creating an alternative system that would circumvent the US dollar standard, possibly with their own bank. 

Perhaps BRICs officials are becoming more aware of the warning given by the French historian and philosopher François-Marie Arouet, popularly known by his nom de plume Voltaire: Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value--zero.