India announces first BRICS Bank President

The BRICSPOST runs this article which announces that Kundapur Vaman Kamath of India will be the first BRICS Bank President. This is another step forward for the BRICS nations in their efforts to move the world away from a global financial now dominated by the US dollar. However, as noted in the quotes shown below this is a slow moving process.

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"Ahead of the 7th BRICS Summit in Russia, the Indian government on Monday announced the appointment of Indian banker Kundapur Vaman Kamath as president of the $100 billion New Development Bank being set up by the BRICS. Kamath has earlier worked with the Asian Development Bank and was the FORBES ASIA’s 2007 Businessman of the Year.

The BRICS Bank launched last year will fund infrastructure projects in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, and challenge the dominance of the Western-led World Bank and the IMF.

The bank is likely to be operationalised within one year, Indian Finance Ministry official Rajiv Mehrishi said."

. . . . 

"South African Trade and Industry Rob Davies said last year that although the capital of the New Development Bank and the Contingency Reserve Arrangement had been set at $100 billion each, this did not mean that this capital would necessarily be held in US dollars.

“We want to move away from the same old, same old way of doing things. What currencies the capital will be held in is something that will be part of the Sherpa process with the pace set by Brazil, but we expect substantive progress by the time of the next BRICS summit in Russia in June 2015,” he said."

. . . . .

“For the past 15 years, the BRICS have been seen as the world’s best hope for sustainable growth. These five countries, representing 40 per cent of the world’s population and 25 per cent of its GDP in 2013, recorded growth rates 4 to 5 times greater than those of the US, Europe and Japan, and threatened to displace them as the world’s most important economic powers in another 20 years or so,” say Prof. Ingo Walter and Prof. Roy C. Smith of the New York University, writing for The BRICS Post.

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My added comments:

The BRICS Bank is still a year away from being "operational" and the article cites a quote that the process of moving away from the US dollar could be a "20 years or so" long process. This is not the kind of dramatic change we watch for here. If the change takes places slowly over 20 years, the impact on the average person will likely not be noticed very much. It would mean a major crisis scenario was avoided.