I wish that were true, but it seems these days "news" is twisted and deformed by whatever the political agenda of the people giving the news. To be sure, the Russia-China bank deal is mostly a symbolic step. Liza Ermolenko, an emerging markets economist at Capital Economics in London, said that the deal was still “a very small one, in the grand scale of things,” and that it wouldn’t change Russia’s reliance on the dollar “overnight.” Most of Russia’s export contracts in the oil and gas markets are still priced in dollars, she noted, and on a wider scale, replacing the dollar with the ruble is much too risky to even consider.
This is actually big news, especially if it starts a trend. Energy is sold using petrodollars, so each country must maintain a reserve of dollars. This allows the U.S. to have more debt than the rest. If an alternate payment system develops, our goose is cooked and we're dead ducks.
