The yuan has become the main foreign currency traded in Russia. Getty Images
The Chinese yuan became the most traded foreign currency on the Moscow Stock Exchange last year.
The yuan accounted for 42 percent of foreign exchange transactions, surpassing the dollar’s share of 39.5 percent.
Yuan trading volume tripled to 34.15 trillion rubles ($385 billion) by 2023, while the dollar’s volume fell.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Business Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by an editor.
The Chinese yuan was the most traded foreign currency on the Moscow Stock Exchange last year, dethroning the US dollar.
The renminbi accounted for 42 percent of all foreign exchange trades on Russia’s largest stock exchange, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing data from Russian news agency Kommersant Daily. The volume of yuan traded tripled during 2023 to 34.15 trillion rubles ($385 billion).
Meanwhile, the dollar accounted for 39.5 percent of those transactions, down from over 63 percent in 2022, when trading volume fell by more than a third to 49.90 trillion rubles ($560 billion).
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Russia largely excluded from the global financial system
The shift to lower use of the dollar, commonly referred to as dedollarization, gained momentum after the West imposed heavy sanctions on Russia following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
This left Moscow largely excluded from the global financial system and forced to rely more heavily on currencies other than the dollar and euro. In December, the Kremlin said Russia and China had almost completely stopped using the dollar in bilateral trade.
Meanwhile, countries such as China, India and Iran have also sought to use currencies other than the dollar for trade and international loans to weaken the West’s influence over their economies.
China in particular has aggressively sought to internationalize the yuan. Beijing has signed currency swap agreements and issued yuan-denominated loans.
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And dedollarization appears to be working: In November, the yuan was the fourth most used currency in global payments, doubling from 2022 to a record 4.61 percent.
In September, the yuan also took second place in global trade finance, displacing the euro. This is because Beijing’s lower interest rates made trade financing more affordable, reports the „Financial Times“.
This article has been translated from English. You can do the original here read.