this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, the pivotal point was Russia getting kicked out of SWIFT. That forced a creation of an alternate financial system out of necessity, and over past three years it's expanded significantly within BRICS. The reality is that you don't need to have a reserve currency, you can just do direct currency swaps. But more importantly, China is basically the world's factory, and has a massive trade surplus with the rest of the world. Which means holding yuan is useful for other countries, since they can always exchange it for something tangible they need.

[–] DeepSpace9mm@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Thank you! That is very helpful as a launching point to read about this. Intuitively, what I asked my liberal friend was, "is a reserve currency even necessary?" Turns out, neither of us knows anything about this. They're just arrogant lmao

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 days ago

glad to help :)