🇯🇵🇮🇳BREAKING: Japan and India are moving to settle trade directly in yen and rupee, bypassing the dollar entirely, per Nikkei.

Right now, almost all Japan-India trade routes go through the dollar. A Japanese company selling to India converts yen to dollars, then dollars to rupees, paying two separate conversion spreads and absorbing dollar volatility on a transaction that has nothing to do with the US at all.
This new scheme would let both currencies settle directly against each other, cutting out the middleman currency completely.
The timing is not random. Japan is dealing with a yen near multi-decade lows and a unwinding carry trade that has already pulled tens of billions out of global assets. India is fighting its own rupee weakness and a current account deficit wide enough that Modi is publicly asking citizens to stop buying gold. Both countries are independently trying to reduce their dollar dependency, just from different angles.
This is not BRICS-style dollar rebellion. Japan is a US treaty ally and the largest foreign holder of US debt. When even your closest allies start building dollar-free payment rails for purely practical reasons like cost and speed, that is the more important story than any sanctions-evasion headline.
The dollar's dominance erodes one efficiency decision at a time, not one geopolitical statement at a time.