Andy Schectman, President and Owner of Miles Franklin, believes that a common settlement currency for the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) is an unavoidable outcome. In a recent interview with Michelle Makori, Lead Anchor and Editor-in-Chief at Kitco News, Schectman expressed his conviction that the BRICS will introduce a currency backed by a tangible asset.
“While the timing of the currency’s launch remains uncertain, the increasing alliances within the BRICS group indicate that it is on the horizon,” Schectman stated. He emphasized that the sheer size of the population represented by the BRICS alliance makes the introduction of a common currency a significant event, regardless of the specific timeline.
There have been conflicting reports leading up to the BRICS summit taking place in Johannesburg from August 22-24. Anil Sooklal, South Africa’s Ambassador at Large to Asia and BRICS, stated last month that a BRICS currency was not on the summit’s agenda. He clarified that the focus of the summit would be on trading and settling in local currencies.
Although the immediate goals for the BRICS group revolve around sidestepping the SWIFT system and avoiding Western sanctions, one event in the upcoming summit that investors should closely monitor is Saudi Arabia’s participation. This is because Saudi Arabia’s involvement could have a significant impact on the global de-dollarization movement.
Schectman sees Saudi Arabia as a crucial player in the transition away from the U.S. dollar. He predicts that eventually, 85% of the global population will abandon the greenback. This possible shift is rooted in the petrodollar system, where countries need to hold dollars to purchase oil from Saudi Arabia.
Schectman referred to the deal made between the Nixon administration and Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, which established that Saudis would exclusively trade oil in dollars in exchange for U.S. security guarantees. This agreement also led to a shift within OPEC to conduct oil sales in dollars, creating a synthetic demand for the dollar.
The recent actions of Saudi Arabia, including its decision to join the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), indicate a growing departure from the influence of Western powers. The SCO is a political, security, and trade alliance created in 2001 as a counterbalance to Western influence. As Saudi Arabia aligns itself with such powerful entities, it further lends credibility to the de-dollarization movement.
Schectman believes that the movement against the dollar extends beyond the BRICS bloc. If all these new alliances come together, it would represent a staggering 85% of the global population. He highlights the significance of merging initiatives such as the Belt Road Initiative, the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Eurasian Economic Union.
The trend of de-dollarization has been rapidly accelerating and is now seen as irreversible. “We are at a point of no return – ‘past the Rubicon,'” Schectman asserts. The settling of transactions outside the U.S. dollar diminishes its demand and puts pressure on its value, leading to rising interest rates.
Schectman paints a vivid analogy to describe the process: “It’s like a game of Jenga. You keep pulling out these pieces of the dollar hegemony one by one. At what point does it tumble? It’s not going to happen overnight, but you can see the acceleration. So little by little, and then all at once.”
The introduction of a BRICS currency, backed by a tangible asset, seems inevitable according to Andy Schectman. The shifting alliances within the BRICS group, the potential involvement of Saudi Arabia, and the growing trend of de-dollarization all contribute to this movement away from the U.S. dollar. The world’s reserve currency faces challenges as various countries seek to trade and settle transactions using their own currencies, potentially leading to a substantial impact on the global financial landscape.
Editor’s Note: While many precious metals companies are using this news as a scare tactic to generate sales, we tend to look at this in the long-term. Is it prudent to buy physical precious metals or back your retirement with them? Absolutely. But don’t get pushed into a poor deal based on fear. We recommend four America First companies who can help.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
