Samer Choucair: BRICS Is Approaching Half of the Global Economy, but the Dollar Is Still in the Driver’s Seat
Investment leader Samer Choucair believes the rise of BRICS represents a significant shift in the structure of the global economy, but it does not yet amount to a fully developed alternative to the dollar-led financial system.
The 11-member group represents roughly half of the world’s population and around 39% of global GDP measured at purchasing power parity. According to official BRICS figures, its members also account for approximately a quarter of global trade, although the precise share varies depending on the methodology used to calculate trade flows.
Choucair said these figures require investors to distinguish between economic scale and financial power. BRICS’ growing demographic and productive weight gives the group greater influence over global trade, energy markets, and supply chains, but that does not automatically transform it into a unified financial bloc.
The group brings together economies with substantially different economic structures, monetary policies, regulatory frameworks, and degrees of capital-market openness. According to Samer Choucair, treating BRICS as a single investable market would therefore be an inaccurate approach to capital allocation.
The more consequential question is whether the bloc can eventually challenge the financial infrastructure underpinning the dollar.
For now, Choucair believes that outcome remains distant.
The U.S. dollar accounted for 57.13% of allocated global foreign-exchange reserves in the first quarter of 2026. Its dominance is even more pronounced in currency trading: the dollar was on one side of 89.2% of all foreign-exchange transactions worldwide in April 2025.
The Chinese renminbi, by comparison, has become increasingly important in international trade and settlement, but its share of allocated global foreign-exchange reserves stood at only around 1.95% in the final quarter of 2025.
For Samer Choucair, those numbers highlight the distinction between the gradual diversification of the international monetary system and the outright displacement of the dollar.
Expanding local-currency settlement between BRICS economies can reduce some of the costs and risks associated with relying on the dollar for bilateral trade. But local-currency settlement alone is not sufficient to redesign the global financial architecture.
A genuinely multipolar currency system requires deep and liquid bond markets, extensive hedging instruments, currency convertibility, credible monetary institutions, and payment and clearing infrastructure capable of absorbing enormous institutional capital flows.
This is why the dollar’s position cannot be assessed solely by measuring how much trade is settled in alternative currencies. Reserve managers, multinational corporations, sovereign wealth funds, banks, and global asset managers also require liquidity, collateral, transparent pricing, and the ability to enter and exit positions at scale.
In that sense, Samer Choucair sees BRICS less as an immediate replacement for the existing monetary system and more as an increasingly important mechanism for diversifying it.
For Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf, Choucair said BRICS should not be interpreted as a binary choice between East and West. Its greater strategic value lies in expanding the network of trade, investment, financing, and industrial partnerships available to Gulf economies.
The most compelling opportunities remain concentrated in areas where economic fundamentals can support long-term capital deployment, including energy, manufacturing, logistics, technology, and infrastructure.
The critical investment discipline, however, is selectivity.
Rather than assigning a single BRICS risk premium or investment thesis to the entire bloc, institutional investors should evaluate each country, industry, regulatory environment, and capital market individually.
Samer Choucair concluded that the most realistic scenario is not the collapse of dollar dominance, but the gradual erosion of its near-monopoly as local currencies gain a larger role in bilateral trade, reserve portfolios become more diversified, and global centers of production, commerce, and investment become increasingly distributed.
“The institutional investor does not allocate capital according to geopolitical slogans,” Choucair said. “Capital ultimately follows productivity, governance, liquidity, market depth, the protection of invested capital, and the ability to generate returns that can be credibly priced.”
For investors, that may be the defining BRICS story of the coming years: not the sudden arrival of a post-dollar world, but the gradual emergence of a more diversified global financial system in which the dollar remains firmly in the driver’s seat while alternative channels of trade and capital continue to expand.