The Dollar Isn’t Dying. It’s Being Ghosted

How half the planet quietly built a back door to the global economy while the financial pages were busy looking the other way.

My personal monetary system consists of a biscuit tin, a Spanish bank card that works roughly two days in five, and a neighbour who will happily swap a dozen eggs for an hour of me swearing at his solar regulator. I am not, by any reasonable measure, a man the Federal Reserve loses sleep over. And yet I’ve spent the past couple of weeks reading about the plumbing of global money, because something rather large is happening down there in the pipework, and almost nobody upstairs seems to have noticed the noise.

If you get your financial news from the usual places, you’ll know the US dollar as something closer to a law of physics than a currency. It’s simply there, like gravity or VAT. Whenever a gathering of non-Western leaders starts muttering about “de-dollarisation,” the coverage tends to land somewhere between a raised eyebrow and a pat on the head… political theatre, men in sashes making speeches for the cameras back home, nothing to see here. And to be fair, most of the speeches are theatre. But while everyone was watching the stage, a lot of people were busy backstage with spanners.

What’s happening isn’t a collapse. Nobody is burning down the bank. They’re just building another one across the road, with a side entrance, and quietly moving some of the furniture.

The day the post office started reading the letters

To understand why, you need to know about SWIFT, which sounds like a budget airline but is actually a messaging system based in Belgium. When a bank in Jakarta needs to tell a bank in Johannesburg that some money is on its way, SWIFT is how it says so. For decades it functioned as the neutral postal service of world banking. Dull, reliable, apolitical, the sort of institution that would struggle to hold a conversation at a dinner party, which is exactly what you want from your plumbing.

Then, in 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, Western governments pulled major Russian banks off SWIFT and froze something in the region of $300 billion of Russia’s central bank reserves. Now, I spent a sizeable chunk of my working life on the receiving end of Cold War posturing, so I’m hardly about to start a fan club for the Kremlin. The point here isn’t whether it was deserved. The point is what every other finance ministry on the planet learned while watching it happen.

The lesson went something like this: your savings are yours for precisely as long as you remain on the guest list. Imagine discovering that your building society could lock your account because you’d said something rude about the manager’s brother-in-law at a barbecue, and that there was no appeal, no ombudsman, and the brother-in-law also owned the building society. You’d start looking into alternatives. You might even keep a biscuit tin. Central banks across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Gulf came to much the same conclusion, just with more zeros and fewer biscuits.

Building the back roads

So they started building. Not one grand rival system with a flag and an anthem, but a sprawl of back roads, bypasses and farm tracks that increasingly join up.

The biggest of these is China’s CIPS, the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, which exists to move renminbi around the world without asking Belgium’s permission. If you’ve imagined it as a sort of pop-up stall, adjust accordingly. It reportedly has around 1,600 participating institutions worldwide and handles somewhere north of $24 trillion a year. That isn’t a protest movement. That’s a motorway.

Then there’s Project mBridge, which is where things get properly futuristic, or properly unsettling, depending on how you feel about governments and digital money. The central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE and, since 2024, Saudi Arabia have built a platform where their digital currencies can settle trade with each other directly and almost instantly, cutting out the Western correspondent banks that traditionally sat in the middle taking a slice. It has reportedly processed tens of billions of dollars’ worth of transactions, and the overwhelming majority of them (the figures doing the rounds suggest over 90%) are settled in the digital yuan. The Bank for International Settlements, the Basel-based club for central bankers that helped incubate the project, stepped back from it in late 2024, which is a bit like the referee wandering off the pitch at half-time while both teams agree to carry on without him.

The cleverest bit, though, is the least glamorous. For years, the internet has been promising us a gold-backed “BRICS currency” that will dethrone the dollar by next Tuesday, and for years it has failed to turn up, like a cousin who keeps saying he’s in the area. That was always the wrong thing to watch. What’s actually happening is that countries are plugging their domestic payment apps into each other. India’s UPI, Brazil’s Pix and a growing tangle of networks across Southeast Asia are being wired together so that trade can settle in rupees, reais and ringgit without first being converted into dollars and then converted back again. A broader BRICS Pay layer to connect these systems is still at the pilot stage, but the direction is obvious. Nobody is inventing a new global language. They’ve just hired some very good translators.

Follow the oil

If the dollar has a beating heart, it’s energy. Since the 1970s, the world’s oil has been priced and largely paid for in dollars, which meant that every country needing to keep the lights on also needed a healthy supply of greenbacks. The petrodollar was the most effective loyalty scheme ever devised, and it didn’t even come with a free coffee after the tenth purchase.

That arrangement is fraying at the edges. Russia, China, India and Saudi Arabia are increasingly buying and selling oil, gas and coal in yuan, dirhams and rupees, often through straightforward bilateral deals. It’s not a stampede, but it’s no longer a novelty either.

And then there’s the gold. Central banks have been buying physical gold at a pace not seen in generations, topping a thousand tonnes a year in each of 2022, 2023 and 2024, and much of that buying has come from exactly the countries that watched the Russian reserves vanish behind a padlock. Gold has one property that no US Treasury bond can match: if it’s sitting in a vault in your own capital city, nobody in Washington can freeze it with a phone call. It is, essentially, the sovereign version of stuffing cash under the mattress, except it’s being done by men in suits that cost more than my car, and they’re calling it “reserve diversification” so it doesn’t sound like what it is.

Two sermons, one collection plate

Naturally, this has caused a certain amount of tutting.

The Western case against all this is not frivolous, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. Regulators argue that these alternative rails create enormous blind spots for anti-money laundering checks, that they make sanctions easier to dodge, and that they weaken whatever leverage the world has left for enforcing human rights or stopping the spread of weapons. The same plumbing that lets a Thai rice exporter avoid a fat intermediary fee also lets a regime buy drone components without anyone in Brussels noticing. That’s a real problem, not a talking point.

The view from the Global South is equally hard to dismiss. Supporters see this as plain financial sovereignty. Trading in local currencies reduces exchange-rate risk, avoids paying a toll to Western banks for the privilege of doing business with your own neighbours, and shields domestic economies from decisions made in Washington for domestic American reasons. When the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to cool inflation in Ohio, the debt repayments of a country like Ghana or Pakistan can balloon overnight, and nobody in Ohio has ever been asked to apologise. If you’d spent fifty years being splashed by someone else’s puddle, you’d buy wellies too.

Here’s where I’m going to be mildly annoying and refuse to pick a side, because both sermons have some hypocrisy in the collection plate. There is something deliciously rich about Western institutions warning the world about “opaque, unaccountable financial systems” when the last truly catastrophic global financial meltdown was manufactured, packaged and sold with a bow on it by the most regulated banks on Earth. But there’s also something naïve about cheering every new rail as a triumph of freedom. A programmable digital yuan is not a liberation tool. A currency that can be switched off by a different bureaucrat in a different capital isn’t independence… it’s a change of landlord. Those of you who read my piece on verification creep, “Please Verify Your Age,” will know I don’t trust a digital wallet any further than I could throw a central banker, regardless of which flag is flying over his office.

So what happens now?

Honestly? Probably nothing you’ll notice for a while. The dollar will still dominate global trade next year and very likely the year after. Most of the world’s debt is still written in it, most of its savings are still parked in it, and anyone telling you it’ll be worthless by Christmas is usually selling either gold coins or a newsletter subscription with “awakening” in the title.

What’s changed is that the dollar is no longer the only road into town. For the first time since the Bretton Woods agreement at the end of the Second World War, a meaningful chunk of the planet has a working alternative, and it didn’t arrive with a revolution. It arrived with software updates, bilateral agreements and a lot of very boring meetings. The truly significant changes in history usually do. The empire doesn’t fall; it just gets ghosted, one unanswered message at a time.

I’d love to tell you whether a world with two sets of financial plumbing is safer or more dangerous than one. It’s probably both, in different ways, for different people, and the people who’ll find out first are the ones with the least say in it. A single system meant one powerful gatekeeper you could at least see. Two systems mean two gatekeepers, a lot of blind spots between them, and a choice of whose surveillance you’d prefer.

I checked the biscuit tin this morning. Eleven euros, a button, and a receipt for chicken feed. Unfreezable, as far as I’m aware.

For now.

Until Next Time