“It’s everywhere you want to be.” That was the tag-line of an advertising campaign launched for Visa credit cards in the 1980s. The slogan works equally well for the US dollar, despite a lot of angst over the status of the world’s main reserve currency.
And that’s true even in places you might not expect—like Kazan, Russia, where President Vladimir Putin—a champion of reducing the international role of the dollar—hosted the annual BRICS summit this week. Despite all the enthusiasm for de-dollarization, the confab’s organizers advised attendees to bring greenbacks (or euros) with them to the city on the Volga. (Non-Russian Visa cards won’t work, they added.)
