Dedollarisation’s winners and losers
Peter McGahan
Monday, 16th June 2025.
PART 12 in the Dedollarisation Series: Let’s start with the winners.
First up: countries rich in commodities but no longer dependent on selling them in dollars. Think Russia, Brazil, the UAE, even Saudi Arabia, nations whose natural resources now trade in local currencies or via regional blocs like BRICS. That means when they sell oil or gas, the money comes straight into their economy in a currency they control. There’s no longer a need to hold dollars, hedge against currency shocks, or follow the US Federal Reserve’s every move. Whoop.
Winning asset classes? Gold and tokenised gold: Already being accumulated by central banks as the ultimate non-dollar safe asset. Its increasingly used in BRICS financial infrastructure.
Real assets: Farmland (why Gates is buying up so much of the US farmland), water rights, energy infrastructure sectors directly aligned with tangible value in a de-financialising world.
Digital assets: Sovereign-backed CBDCs and possibly Bitcoin (as a stateless reserve alternative), but only in jurisdictions open to them.
These countries now enjoy greater policy independence. They’re not dragged along by US interest rate hikes, and they’re able to reinvest their commodity income into long-term projects like roads, power stations, digital infrastructure in ways that can create sustainable domestic growth and attract foreign investors. Read the extraordinary success China has had with this. That’s why, increasingly, investors are chasing yields in real, productive assets in these markets.
Next: The builders of new trade routes outside of Washington’s influence. Countries trading directly with each other like India with the UAE, China with Russia are setting up real-time payment systems that settle in rupees, dirhams, rubles, or yuan. This reduces the impact of US monetary shocks, shields them from the political risk of sanctions, and creates a far more stable trade environment.
For investors, that opens the door to frontier markets and regional partnerships that offer not just growth, but resilience. I’ve just spent 40 days in India. Infrastructure growth beyond belief. Look at their trade corridor with the Gulf, maturing into an instantaneous non-dollar system payments. China and Russia’s multi-billion-dollar infrastructure projects are paid in local currencies. They signal a rewiring of the global economy that investors are beginning to follow.
Those who get the digital foundation right. Countries adopting central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), like China’s e-CNY, or the mBridge system linking Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UAE are building sovereign financial systems that operate entirely outside of Western control. No SWIFT. No dollar. No intermediaries.
These CBDCs are programmable, traceable, and increasingly used especially across BRICS and Belt and Road economies. For emerging markets, this is a game changer. Loans repaid in digital local currency. Infrastructure financed without touching New York or London. It’s fast and direct. And it’s sovereign to them.
The losers.
Top of the list: investors heavily exposed to dollar-denominated assets, especially those who assume past performance will continue into a very different future. If you’re a UK investor buying US stocks and the dollar slides, you might gain on the asset but lose on the exchange rate. The currency erosion wipes out your return.
Add to that the decline in global trust. US Treasuries, once the safest store of value, are being sold off by central banks from China to the Gulf. The dollar’s “safe haven” status is no longer a given and neither is the premium pricing of blue-chip US assets.
Then there's the potential squeeze on tech stocks. If the dollar loses its global role, the US government will find it harder to borrow cheaply. That could drive up real interest rates, which eats into the valuation of long-term growth stocks. The market doesn’t collapse. It re-prices. And not in your favour.
Finally, the biggest loser may be the US itself or at least its monopoly on global capital. In a dedollarising world, money flows don’t automatically head for Wall Street. They go to Dubai, Shanghai, São Paulo. Markets that were once considered peripheral are now becoming central. And the deeper the digital infrastructure becomes, the less the dollar matters.
The takeaway? Investing in this new order and being passive is not an option. The winners are already positioning themselves, trading in their own currencies, issuing digital money, and anchoring growth to real assets. The losers are waiting for the old world to return.
It won’t. And the money knows it.
To understand the whole structure of dedollarisation, I’m creating a complimentary factsheet which you can register for by emailing info@wwfp.net but if you have a question on the subject, also send me an email to this address also.
Peter McGahan is the Chief Executive Officer of Independent Financial Adviser Worldwide Financial Planning. Worldwide Financial Planning is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
