SA’s Chairing of BRICS

As this Newsletter has reported recently, SA took over the chair of BRICS this year. The trade alliance has become increasingly popular, with Saudi Arabia joining, and 4 countries joining the BRICS Development Bank – Egypt, UAE, Uruguay and Bangladesh – which maybe a first step towards full membership in the future. BRICS operates a number of working committees, one is on Financial Services. The SA chair of that committee has undertaken to prepare 2 studies of particular relevance to EFSA, one on data flows which will inevitably look at data privacy and data localisation regulations, and the second on the introduction of a stable coin. This latter study will be interesting insofar as India offered its currency (the INR) as a global currency recently, and Russia has made it known that it would like to see gold becoming the basis for a stable coin solution (gold was the global standard for centuries until 1914, and then partially reintroduced under the Bretton Woods agreement until 1973). Russia holds vast gold reserves. Meanwhile, a non-BRICS member,  Zimbabwe, reportedly plans to launch gold-backed digital currency