Prepare for the Impending Attack on America

You ever find yourself driving along a familiar street you haven’t driven in a while, and suddenly you notice there’s a new Chick-fil-a or whatever and, surprised, you think to yourself, “When did they put that there?”

Nobody announces these kinds of things. No press conferences. No eager soundbites on the local five o’clock news.

Instead, they just build it and one day half the traffic on that road you’re familiar with is pulling into the right-hand lane to zip through Chick-fil-a for a breakfast biscuit with honey.

Now, let’s go a little bigger… let’s go global, because a construction project is underway and too few people are paying attention. But one day soon enough, people are going to look up from what they’re doing to say, “When did they put that there?”

The construction project I’m talking about is really a project to replumb the world’s finances.

Sounds boring.

Probably is, unless you’re a central banker… or a dollar investor.

The central bankers of the world will be happy with this construction project; some are active builders.

Dollar investors, though… yeah, they’re not going to like this one little bit.

For decades now—Abe Lincoln would call it “four score”—Uncle Sam’s money was Grand Poobah of the World, a dominance that has rested on a simple structural reality: there was no alternative.

Moving money around the world, whether to buy Japanese TVs, Korean cars, French wine, or American pop-tarts, necessitated the SWIFT system—a largely dollar-based messaging network that processes international financial transactions for big banks and governments.

For those four-score, the dollar was pretty much the only game in town… sort of like an Eastern European block of apartments in which the heat is controlled centrally, meaning that in the dead of winter, you’d often have to open a window in a blizzard for fear of dying of heat exposure inside your apartment.

Nowadays, the dollar isn’t the only plumbing in the building.

All over the world, countries are building alternative plumbing that entirely sidesteps the dollar.

China’s cross-border interbank payment system—called CIPS—processed $24.47 trillion in transactions in 2024, growing 43% in a single year. By March 2026, daily transaction volumes were running 50% above February levels, with a single-day record of $178.5 billion. It now operates across 124 countries with more than 1,700 participating institutions.

None of that money flows through SWIFT. None of it touches US shores, relies on US banks, or requires dollars in the mix.

There’s also mBridge—a central bank digital currency platform operated jointly by China, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Hong Kong. It has already processed more than $55 billion in cross-border settlements, with transactions clearing in 15 seconds, entirely outside the existing dollar architecture. Dozens more countries want to join mBridge.

Meanwhile, bilateral trade agreements denominated in local currencies are multiplying. Russia and China now conduct an estimated 90% or more of their bilateral trade outside the dollar. India is settling energy purchases in rupees. Brazil and China are trading in yuan and reais. The Gulf states are increasingly willing to accept non-dollar payment for oil — a development that, even five years ago, would have been unthinkable.

And more than half of China’s global trade is now settled in yuan instead of dollars, meaning the rest of the world is happy to trade with China in its own currency rather than in America’s currency.

Now, to be fair, few of these individual transactions are large enough to matter on their own.

But collectively, they represent something: proof of concept.

They demonstrate that the new plumbing works.

And pray tell, El Jefe, why does any of this matter to me?

Through the accumulation of small sovereign decisions that many different global actors are making, the world is announcing that the dollar is increasingly ordinary. It is no longer exceptional.

A lot of the media (at least when they get around to talking about it) position this as the world declaring war on the dollar. It’s not a war, though. Not at all.

Like I said, it’s a construction project.

The world is building new plumbing that runs parallel to the dollar, but doesn’t include the dollar and gives the US no power to impose sanctions or use currency as a weapon to browbeat the world.

This is why I spend so much time focused on these seemingly dull monetary developments. People hear “national security” and immediately think tanks, missiles, and fighter jets.

I’m not so sure.

If you can build a world in which countries no longer need the dollar, you’ve weakened America without firing a shot. That’s what makes this construction project so important. China can trade directly with Singapore. Thailand can trade directly with the UAE. Brazil can trade directly with China. And nowhere in those transactions does a dollar need to appear.

Do that, and you reduce demand for the dollar, which drives down the value of the dollar on the world stage, which drives up inflation in America, and weakens American households.

When the world needs fewer dollars, demand for US Treasuries falls—and that just rumbles through the American financial landscape like a mole ripping up your garden and you don’t even see him. Interest rates that consumers and the government pay rise, and everything Americans borrow money for gets more expensive and the American standard of living continually weakens.

(If you’re feeling in any way nervous reading this, I highly recommend taking a look at my upcoming Future of Wealth Summit, taking place later this year. We’ll spend part of the weekend discussing how investors can position themselves—and protect their purchasing power—if the dollar’s role in the world continues to weaken… which it will. Click here for all the details…) 

So maybe it’s not a mole, actually. Maybe the better analogy is termites silently gnawing away at the foundations of your house. You think your American life is structurally strong… and one day you find out it’s not.

In September, representatives from dozens of nations will gather for what may become a milestone meeting in the formalization of this alternative architecture. Maybe we see more countries join this construction project; maybe not.

But the construction crews are already well into this project.

And at some point, someone in the American government—probably a mid-level mandarin on a research desk somewhere—is going to show their boss all this new plumbing that has been built. And the surprised reply that comes will be something similar to “When did they put that there?”