Mark Moss explains how China is building a parallel financial system where gold, not currency, settles international payments. Through the Shanghai Gold Exchange and swap lines with 32 countries, China is creating an alternative to the U.S. dollar and SWIFT that lets nations bypass American sanctions.
The dollar isn't just the reserve currency. The dollar is also the payment network of the world. So the US is able to slap sanctions on people like, hey, no network for you. Well, what China's been doing is they've been actively working on setting up a parallel financial system, a whole new set of rails that are on gold. And they've been doing it through Hong Kong with the Shanghai Gold Exchange. And what they're using is their own currency, the RMB, which nobody would ever use or trust that money. But they're not relying on that. They're using the RMB for the liquidity piece, but they're settling in gold. People trust gold. They've already opened up swap lines with, I think, 32 countries, pretty much every country but the US. And so what that means is that now all these countries can do business with each other, settle in gold, and completely bypass— it's like instead of using the fiat rails like SWIFT, I'm going to send you Bitcoin. That's basically what we're talking about here, right? What happens is every time we kick more people out of the party, they just go have a party somewhere else.
