Which countries are dumping the dollar and why?

Published time: 19 May, 2018 07:23

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The European Union is considering switching payments from the US dollar to the euro after Washington threatened to target European firms working in Iran, according to reports.

The measure may help the EU to retain one of the world's largest markets, which was opened for trade after the historic nuclear deal signed by Tehran and the P5+1 powers (China, France, Russia, UK, US, plus Germany) in June 2015.

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The idea to eliminate the role of the greenback in international settlements is not new. Aside from the EU, a number of nations have been mulling the idea. RT discussed with analysts how realistic the prospect of countries ditching the dollar is.

In light of the recent developments Iran is the most pressured nation to drop the dollar with Tehran having partially adjusted trade without the US currency, Alexandre Kateb, president of Competence Finance SAS, told RT.

"When Iran was previously under sanctions from 2012 to 2015, it established new mechanisms to bypass US-related financial institutions, such as barter exchange and to replace the dollar with other currencies, such as the renminbi in its bilateral trade with China or the euro in its trade with European countries," the economist said.

At the same time, China's recent move to trade oil in yuan is seen as an initial step to challenging the dollar dominance, Stephen Innes, Head of FX Trading for OANDA in Asia Pacific told RT, stressing that the number of bilateral trade agreements, signed amongst Asia Pacific nations, will settle in yuan.

"Mainland it is laying the ground for the Belt and Road Initiative, and China is even sweetening the pot by offering swap facilities to local countries to promote the use of the yuan," he added.

Experts are unanimous on the point that bi- and multi-lateral pacts between various nations could become the major drivers on the way toward decreasing the dependence on US currency in international trade.

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"This would depend on the leverage the EU, the UK, Russia and China deploy. The likely scenario is diversification – bilateral arrangements between trading partners, or regional arrangements, substituting for multilateral arrangements that supported dollar dominance," Ramaa Vasudevan an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics, Colorado State University told RT.

At the same time, analysts admit that getting rid of the greenback is not an easy task. It took the US dollar nearly a century to unsettle the British pound that had been enjoying its preeminence through the 19th century and the first half of the 20th as the global reserve currency.

"Old habits are hard to break as most of the global hedging is still done on US exchanges like Nymex or ICE," Innes said. "The issues are working out the deliverable to hedge ratio factors which could put many off from breaking long-held settlement in US dollar."

"The US dollar is still, for many reasons, the international trade and reserve currency of choice," according to Kateb. "The whole international financial system is currently structured around the United States and around the central role of the dollar."

However, the expert noted that the international system will change dramatically. Rapid development of blockchain technology along with rooting of virtual currencies is reportedly set to bring about the changing process.

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"Eventually, the evolution of global finance will be very much related to the evolution of the global balance of power," the economist told RT. "This will not happen overnight. It will take time and many more crises and balance shifts. None really knows what the new system will look like."

The experts agreed that expelling the greenback from its dominant position in the international monetary system will take much more effort than just replacing it with the euro or other domestic currencies.

"Dollar dominance does not depend simply on its use to denominate trade, but on the dollar's role as the pivot of the international financial system – the fact that about 88 percent of the average daily turnover of foreign exchange instruments is against the dollar, in contrast to the share of the euro which is only about 31 percent," said Vasudevan.

The researcher highlighted that the recent impulse for dislodging the US currency is a symptom of a wider discontent with the rules of the dollar system, but is not a cure for the dollar problem.