Maybe they aren’t as popular as the Big Brother contestants, but in their own way they say that we are closed in a cage: that of an economic system jammed with balances destined to change quickly. The game is played mainly in Africa, the scenario is a deglobalized world. The screenwriters of this Truman Show are Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo – a couple, even in real life, of MIT scholars – and Michael Kremer (Harvard), who won the Nobel for economics thanks to «their experimental studies to address the problem of global poverty.” It’s a sort of oxymoron. Awarding the Nobel to those who deal with poverty means having acknowledged that the Western model – capital and democracy – is in decline. There is another gentleman unknown to most: Joaquín Alonso Vázquez. This is the new Minister of Economy of Cuba, a country in poverty, with tourism having collapsed by 7.9 percent in the last year, now below two million arrivals. Vázquez is also looking for an answer to poverty – the GDP per capita on the island is 3,479 dollars a year – and he has found it: entering the Brics, with China ready to invest to bring the challenge home to the United States. Cuba joined the economic system on January 1st with Belarus, Bolivia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan, in addition to the founding countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Iran participated as an observer at the latest summit, in late October, in Kazan, Russia, where Vladimir Putin sought to transform the economic dialogue into a strategic alliance.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also pays careful attention to this “cartel”. (disturbing attention considering that Turkey has the second largest NATO army), just as the Gulf countries look with interest at the Brics. Donald Trump immediately proposed a relaunch of American investments in both Qatar and Oman – where he has considerable personal interests: he is building some luxury resorts around the Omani capital Muscat. An epochal challenge therefore stands out on the horizon of this millennium. It is not the tariffs threatened by Trump that are becoming an alibi for European inaction or for agreements – such as Mercosur – wanted by Ursula von der Leyen that feel like a last resort. The real challenge was launched by the new global advisor Mario Draghi. He wrote: either Europe immediately invests 800 billion a year and convinces itself that taking on debt is indispensable, or the Union is finished. The model – writes Draghi – based on the exploitation of foreign demand and the export of capital with low wage levels is no longer sustainable. Otherwise we just have to study poverty. Because in the deglobalized world there are other protagonists. They are precisely the Brics, that group of nations that would once have called themselves “the non-aligned” and which today are the planets of the Chinese “solar system”. They are continually growing both economically and demographically, they are studying their own payment system and want to elevate the renminbi (or yuan) – the Chinese currency – to a currency of exchange. Even if India is starting to think that its rupee could soon have even greater strength. What accelerated this attack on the dollar-based global economic system were the sanctions imposed on Russia. The Kremlin, excluded from the Swift global transaction system, developed precisely with the American currency, has asked its Chinese ally to consolidate the alternative Cips circuit (acronym for Cross-Border Interbank Payment System) which is managed by the People’s Bank of China, is denominated in the Dragon currency (the renminbi) and is supported by 1,280 financial institutions around the world, including some Japanese, Russian and African banks. But it is only a side effect: the “core business” of this challenge is who grabs the mineral and energy resources, who controls the trade and who owns the industries to produce. And above all who sells what to whom. A quarter of a century was enough for Beijing to become – since its unconditional entry into the Woto, the World Trade Organization, on 11 December 2001, decided by Bill Clinton and sponsored by Romano Prodi – from the world’s factory to the world’s leading shopkeeper. At the dawn of the new millennium, the Italian politician was president of the European Commission and told the Chinese: «In your relationship with Europe you will have a market of enormous dimensions in front of you»…The data speaks clearly. Faced with a stagnation caused by a crisis in internal demand due to household debt and a real estate bubble, China, in order to maintain the planned growth rate of GDP at 5 percent, did two things: cut rates (exactly the opposite of the West) and vented its productive surplus by increasing exports. In 2024 its trade balance broke all records. Since 1993 it has exported more than it imports and in the year just ended it recorded a surplus of 990 billion dollars. This happened because Trump’s tariffs are feared: but while Europe thoughtfully wonders whether Donald will impose taxes, the Chinese are pushing profitability to the maximum.
The backlash in Europe is immediate: Germany, which has always had Beijing as its main customer, no longer sells (so much so that its exports have been at their lowest since 2023). The numbers say that German exports to third countries fell by 5.3 percent, to the USA by 12.2 percent, to China by 3.8 percent and to Russia by 9.4 percent. Under these conditions, the entire European economy slows down. But there is another fact that is rarely taken into consideration and instead indicates that the Old Continent is destined to be overtaken by the Brics. In the 25 years that China has been in the WTO, Europe has halved its stock market capitalisation. In 2000 (including London) it was worth 34 percent of the global stock market, today just 14.5. On the contrary, Wall Street went from 50 to 66 percent and everything else is in the hands of the Brics. Who claim a place in the sun. From Kazan they made it known: we are half the world. Statistics in hand, the “non-aligned” produce 36 of the world’s GDP and move 37 percent of trade. Just under half of the planet’s population lives within their borders, approximately 3.5 billion people out of eight billion. They occupy a total surface area of approximately 40 million square kilometers and contribute to 40 percent of global oil production. They have surpassed the G7 and their economies – Cuba aside – are all growing. And they can do it themselves. Uganda – for one – has the largest gold reserves and in a year the Makuutu mine will become productive (the country has enormous mineral wealth) from which 126 thousand tonnes of rare earth oxides can be extracted, including 86 thousand tons of neodymium and praseodymium. For China it is an indispensable partner. But the same can be said of Thailand, which has become a high-tech production hub for which a GDP growth of 38 percent is expected over the next five years. Likewise Malaysia, which is growing by 5 percent a year thanks to superconductors and the construction boom has turbocharged its financial market. And if South-East Asia is the production branch of China, the countries of Central Asia are the energy reserve, while Africa is the reservoir of other raw materials including agricultural ones. This is the strength of the Brics and while we await Trump’s decisions, Nerendra Modi archives – data from the International Monetary Fund – a 7 percent growth in Indian GDP in 2024. For a comparison, the president of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde she is satisfied because the Union achieved +0.9 percent. Who is happy…