General discussion thread, page-2716

The S is actually for South Africa. China pushed heavily for South Africa to join the BRICS nations back in 2010. China have a large holding in one of their major banks and are South Africa's biggest trading partner with a net surplus to China in this arrangement.

The benefit of commodities being priced in an alternative currency to USD is that we won't need to watch their markets as we currently do. A currency backed by real commodities, rather than being a fiat creation of a central bank and backed by a government, has the potential to actually to create stability for commodity pricing and remove some blatant manipulation. An example of this is the commonly know gold price manipulation by the LME.