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Comment by TexanFeller | Hacker News Reader

The yuan may be the competition we should fear. Since we disconnected Russia from our financial systems, Russia is willing to do business with our biggest rival, China, in their currency.

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The yuan has capital controls. You can't move money freely in and out of China even (especially) if you're a Chinese national. Absolute non-starter for any kind of reserve currency idea.

For now. China has been actively working on making the yuan a world reserve currency [1], including relaxing the controls if it is adventageous.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/putin-strengthening-yuan-role...

That would require a wholesale change in the way the Chinese government wields it power.

Money flees China now despite the capital controls.

Even the Chinese would rather keep their money in Singapore, Switzerland or the US than at home.

Well, what do you expect? The US over the past several decades has effectively crippled economies for its own interests by cutting off USD access. When you do this to a non-trivial number of countries they get around it by trading among themselves and dumping the USD for their own currencies. There are many countries including India, Japan, Korea, China, Russia, etc who are opening up bilateral or trilateral agreements to trade in their own currencies bypassing the USD. The US has pissed off a significant portion of the world that its days as reserve currency are certainly numbered. However, unbelievable it might sound today but the world is inching closer to non-USD centric future.

Im not sure you understand what reserve currency means.

When Korea buys something from Japan, they don’t have to pay in USD. They can use whatever currency they want.

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