The BRICS bank will promote local currencies without venturing into creating its own currency.

The New Development Bank (NDB), better known as the BRICS bank, announced on Saturday, during its annual meeting in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), that one of its strategic priorities is to “increase financing and resource mobilization in local currencies to reduce exposure to interest rate volatility” and exchange rates, according to the bank’s president, 77-year-old Dilma Rousseff from Brazil. Russia is the main advocate for the bloc and its bank to de-dollarize, but this ambition faces enormous resistance. Countries have opted to intensify the use of their own currencies, which undermines the dominance of the dollar.

The NDB, therefore, avoids embarking on the path toward its own currency, which would reignite the ire of the American Donald Trump, despite Russia’s interest, as it sees this alternative as a way to lessen the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the EU without UN approval due to the Ukraine war. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva also expressed on Friday support for intensifying the debate on a BRICS currency. “The discussion [among bank representatives] about a new trade currency is extremely important. Is it complicated? I know. Are there political problems? I know,” he stated in the inaugural speech of the bank. Brazilian diplomatic sources explain that technical difficulties, even for transactions in local currencies, are enormous and that, in any case, the avenue of electronic payment systems is more promising.

The debate about a BRICS currency and de-dollarization led Trump, on the day of his inauguration, to threaten the bloc’s partners with imposing a 100% tariff if they continued in their endeavor. In his diatribe, the Republican mistakenly included Spain in this group of the Global South.

Rousseff, who was Brazil’s president from 2011 to 2016, added, in response to press questions, that she does not see the dollar losing relevance as a safe-haven currency, although she noted that after the so-called Liberation Day, the day Trump unleashed the tariff war against the rest of the world, “markets did not rush to the dollar, unlike in the 2008 crisis.”

The BRICS bank, founded a decade ago and headquartered in Shanghai (China), is the most tangible achievement of this bloc formed by countries that are quite heterogeneous in terms of size, political system, and geopolitical interests. According to its president, the NDB has 122 projects amounting to about $40 billion, of which approximately $22 billion have been disbursed in recent years.

Colombia and Uzbekistan have joined the new development bank. They join the founding partners (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), along with Bangladesh, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Algeria.

Another priority of the entity is to advance “the expansion through the entry of new members,” Rousseff stated, accompanied by the bank’s vice presidents, at a press conference in the luxury hotel on Copacabana beach where the NDB annual meeting is being held. The former president, from the Workers’ Party, was appointed to her current position by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when he returned to power in 2023.

Rousseff detailed the differences between the BRICS bank and the World Bank or other multilateral development banks. “A project may be liked or not for technical reasons, but we cannot condition [approval] on political grounds,” according to the Brazilian. “Loans are not conditioned on whether you privatize this or that company,” she illustrated.

Within the BRICS bank, as the president emphasized, “relations are based on equality, no country dominates, and all voices are heard. No one has a veto power,” she added. “Countries feel that their sovereignty is respected,” she said without delving into the criticisms that often arise from the Global South regarding the relationships that the West extends to other countries.