Disclaimer: This article is for information only. It is not investment advice and not a recommendation to buy or sell gold, gold mining stocks, currencies, or any other asset. Forecasts and research views can be wrong.
The market has spent years asking the wrong question.
What will replace the dollar?
That question makes good television. It makes weak analysis.
On Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, The Market Ear published a note titled “The Dollar Isn’t Dying. It’s Being Disarmed.” The piece draws on TS Lombard. The argument is simple. The real BRICS project is not a new reserve currency. It is an insurance policy.
China is not trying to put the yuan on the throne. It is trying to survive the next sanctions campaign.
That distinction is the whole gold case in one line.
A world that still uses the dollar, but works every year to make the dollar harder to weaponize, is a world that keeps buying assets outside the dollar’s pipes. Gold is the oldest of those assets. It needs no correspondent bank. It needs no SWIFT code. It needs no CIPS membership.
The dollar can stay king. Gold can still be the lock on the door.
One idea, not a pile of slogans
Forget the slogan of de-dollarization.
Watch de-weaponization instead.
De-dollarization says the greenback loses its job. De-weaponization says the greenback keeps the job, but other states build a side door.
TS Lombard says that side door is the point.
The dollar can remain the main invoicing currency. It can remain the deepest capital market. It can even stay strong on the DXY chart. At the same time, Beijing, New Delhi, Brasilia and others can build rails that let trade clear if Washington ever reaches for the financial bazooka again.
Those two facts can live in the same decade.
Gold sits in the gap between them.
Central banks do not need the yuan to dethrone the dollar before they add gold. They need a reserve that still works if a payment message is blocked. That is a different bid from the old “dollar is dying” trade. It is a slower bid. It is also a harder bid to kill with one strong payroll print.
The numbers that puncture the replacement story
The Market Ear note is blunt about scale.
Only about 2.5% of Indian imports were settled in rupees in fiscal 2026. RMB invoicing was about 1.36% of Brazilian imports in 2025. A TS Lombard chart in the note shows less than 1.5% of Brazilian imports invoiced in yuan. The dollar still dominates that bar chart. The euro is second. The yuan is a sliver.
That is not a coronation.
IMF reserve data has told a similar story this year. The dollar’s share of allocated reserves was still in the high 50s in early 2026. The yuan’s share was still near 2%. Deep dollar liquidity and huge U.S. capital markets remain hard to copy.
TS Lombard expects the dollar to reign into the 2030s.
So the gold investor who waits for the dollar’s funeral will wait a long time. The gold investor who watches insurance demand does not need that funeral.
This is not about dethroning the dollar. It is about building an escape route.
Russia was the live experiment
Russia gave the world the first full-scale test of the dollar as a weapon against a large economy.
The lesson was two-sided. That is TS Lombard’s point, and it is the right point.
Russia found ways around SWIFT. China-Russia trade moved heavily into rubles and yuan. Energy and goods kept moving. The sky did not fall in a single week.
The bigger problem did not vanish.
Correspondent banking, liquidity and convertibility still sit in the way. You can send a message on a new network. You still need a bank that will take the other side. You still need a market that can absorb the currency you just received. You still need to turn that currency into something the rest of the world will accept.
For Beijing, the lesson looks obvious.
Do not wait to be sanctioned before you build the insurance.
Gold is part of that insurance. So are swap lines, offshore yuan deposits, commodity contracts priced in yuan, and a payments network that does not live inside U.S. law. None of those tools has to beat the dollar in a popularity contest. Each tool only has to work on a bad day.
China is buying plumbing, not a crown
China has spent years building the pipes.
The Market Ear note says CIPS has grown from 217 participant banks to 1,829. CIPS, together with Hong Kong’s CHATS, clears around 3 trillion yuan of payments a day. Beijing is also pushing RMB trade settlement, swap lines, offshore RMB assets and yuan-denominated commodity contracts.
Separate public figures on CIPS participation sit in the same neighborhood. Direct members remain a few hundred. Indirect members now run into the thousands across more than 100 countries. Volume is large in yuan terms. It is still small next to the dollar system.
That is fine for the insurance thesis.
You do not need the new rail to carry most of world trade. You need it to carry enough trade that a sanctions hit does not freeze the whole machine.
The Market Ear line is the one that matters.
None of this makes the RMB the new dollar. It does something more useful for Beijing. It raises China’s ability to keep transacting if Washington reaches for the financial bazooka.
Gold does the same job in a vault.
A bar in Shanghai, Ottawa or Zurich does not need CIPS to settle. It does not need CHIPS either. That is why official gold buying accelerated after 2022 and why it has not needed a collapsing DXY to stay alive.
Watch the rails, not the BRICS logo
This is not only a China story.
India’s UPI, Brazil’s Pix, Europe’s TIPS, Project Nexus and Africa’s PAPSS are building instant-payment systems outside the old correspondent-bank maze. TS Lombard sees 2027 and 2028 as the window when more of those rails begin to link.
Volumes are still small. The plumbing is arriving before the flows. That is how infrastructure works.
The non-obvious point in the note is the one gold investors should tape to the monitor.
You do not need a BRICS currency. You need interoperable rails.
A common BRICS note would have to solve politics, inflation, convertibility and trust. Interoperable rails only have to move a payment from one trusted system to another. That is a lower bar. It is also a more realistic bar.
Gold is not a rail. It is what you hold when the rails disagree.
If more trade can clear in local currency by 2028, some dollars will not be needed for that invoice. Those freed dollars do not automatically flow into gold. Some will. Some will sit in local bonds. Some will sit in commodities. The structural change is that more states will have a choice they did not have in 2015.
Choice is what changes reserve behavior.
The World Gold Council’s 2026 central-bank survey captured that shift. Eighty-nine percent of reserve managers expected global official gold holdings to rise over the next 12 months. A record 45% said their own institution may add gold. Crisis performance, diversification and geopolitical hedging now outrank “we have always owned it.” Vaulting is moving closer to home. That is insurance language, not replacement language.
The great dollar irony
Here is the twist that keeps gold honest.
Technology is also making dollars easier to own.
TS Lombard calls it “accidental dollarization.” Dollar-backed stablecoins are spreading through emerging markets. The Market Ear note says stablecoins account for more than 90% of crypto flows in Brazil, even as policymakers talk about reducing dollar dependence.
Governments build pipes to escape the dollar. Citizens use phones to grab digital dollars outside the old banks.
The dollar’s next distribution network may be crypto.
That is why a strong DXY and a strong gold bid can travel together for a while. The FX tape is still a dollar tape. The reserve-manager tape is an insurance tape. Mixing those two tapes is how people lose money.
The Market Ear says it cleanly.
None of this automatically gives you a bearish dollar trade. Structural efforts to neutralize U.S. sanctions power can speed up while the dollar itself stays dominant and trades strong. The long-term DXY trend, in the note’s chart, still holds. The geopolitical story and the FX trade are not the same thing.
De-weaponization does not mean de-dollarization.
What this means for the gold price
Spot gold was near $4,285 an ounce this weekend. That is well below the winter peak near $5,400. It is also well above the world that existed when Russia was first cut off from large parts of the dollar system.
The insurance bid does not guarantee the next $200.
It does change the floor.
In the old model, gold needed falling real yields and a weak dollar at the same time. That model still matters for the next month of trading. ETF flows still flinch when the Fed sounds hard. Futures traders still dump first.
In the new model, official buyers can keep adding metal even when the dollar is firm. They are not trying to call the DXY low. They are trying to own something that cannot be frozen by a message on a U.S. server.
That is why “the dollar isn’t dying” is not a gold-bear headline.
If the dollar were truly dying, gold would be one of many winners, and the path would be violent. If the dollar is merely being disarmed, gold is the specialist product. It is the reserve that works when rails are political.
A specialist product can grind higher for years without a funeral for the old king.
What this means for gold mining stocks
Miners do not sell a narrative. They sell ounces.
A world of slow official buying is a better world for mine margins than a world that waits for the dollar to collapse. The bid is less dramatic. It can also last longer.
Canadian gold mining stocks sit in a useful spot in that story. They list in a market that still clears capital. They produce in a jurisdiction that is not trying to exit the dollar system overnight. They sell a metal that other countries now treat as sanctions insurance.
That does not make every ticker a winner.
It does mean the research question has changed. The question is no longer “which gold stock rips if the dollar dies next Tuesday.” The question is “which producer, royalty or developer can keep selling ounces into a multi-year official bid while the dollar stays the world’s invoice currency.”
Costs still matter. Dilution still matters. A strong dollar can still pressure the gold price and help Canadian cost lines at the same time. Those are details. The theme sits above them.
Gold is the insurance layer in a dollar system that is being fitted with off switches.
How investors can use the distinction
Do not fight the DXY tape with a slogan.
Do not wait for the yuan to become the world’s reserve currency before you study gold.
Watch three gauges.
First, reported and estimated central-bank buying. If official demand stays positive while the dollar holds its reserve share, the insurance thesis is working.
Second, the share of trade settled outside the dollar in large bilateral corridors. China-Russia already moved. Other corridors will be slower. The slope matters more than any one month.
Third, vault location. The World Gold Council survey showed more interest in domestic storage and more diversification of overseas vaults. That is what a sanctions-aware buyer does. It is not what a buyer does when they think the dollar is about to vanish.
If those three gauges stay firm, gold can keep a structural bid even on strong-dollar weeks. If they fade, the old rate-and-dollar model takes the wheel again.
That is a research process. It is not a signal to size a trade today.
The case in one paragraph
The dollar is not being replaced. It is being made harder to use as a weapon.
China is building payment rails so a future sanctions campaign hurts less. India, Brazil, Europe and Africa are building their own rails. Citizens, at the same time, are grabbing dollar stablecoins. The king keeps the crown. The court builds side doors.
Gold is the asset that does not need a side door.
It is not a BRICS currency. It is not a stablecoin. It is not a CIPS balance. It is metal that remains money when the message network becomes a political tool.
That is the case for gold in the TS Lombard world. Not the death of the dollar. The disarming of the dollar.
Those are different trades. Only one of them matches the data.
Source: The Market Ear, “The Dollar Isn’t Dying. It’s Being Disarmed,” Sept. 26, 2026, drawing on TS Lombard research and charts. Additional context from the World Gold Council’s 2026 Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey and public CIPS participation reports. Company and market comments in this article are illustrative only.