The Sirius Report

Global South — alternative financial systems

1. BRICS cross-border payments — the move toward interoperable payment arrangements and bilateral local-currency settlement rather than routing every transaction through dollar infrastructure.
2. China's CIPS expansion — CIPS is becoming an increasingly important RMB-based alternative for cross-border payments, particularly across China's trade relationships with sanctioned and emerging economies.
3. PAPSS in Africa — the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System is creating an African payments layer allowing intra-African trade to settle in local currencies rather than defaulting to dollars.
4. India's UPI becoming an international payments network — India's domestic instant-payment infrastructure is increasingly being connected with foreign payment systems, creating a potential Global South payments bridge.
5. India's local-currency settlement architecture — New Delhi is building mechanisms allowing more bilateral trade to be invoiced and settled directly in

Government bonds are becoming the new systemic collateral problem. For decades, government bonds were treated as risk-free assets.

Increasingly they are now see as risk-free credit, but not necessarily risk-free collateral.

If yields jump violently, the value of collateral falls. Leveraged investors then receive margin calls and have to sell. Then collateral values fall further which is creating the basis for a new fiscal-financial stability crisis