The new currency of want

The Galaxy M9 SUV is loaded with features standard in China but unheard of in the US.

The seats are leather, heated, ventilated, massaging, and fully reclinable. With the press of a button, all three rows (except the driver’s seat) fold flat to create cargo space.

A built-in refrigerator can be set to cold for drinks or to warm for food. Exterior speakers play songs or shout greetings at passersby. The 30-inch dashboard display has 6k resolution and “iPhone-like” responsiveness. 

There’s a built-in karaoke machine.

It’s highly capable, too. The plug-in hybrid has a driving range of 808 miles. It accelerates from 0 to 60 in 4.2 seconds — faster than a BMW X5. The cabin registers just 32.5 decibels of noise when at idle — quieter than a Rolls-Royce Spectre.

The cost of such luxury? $25,000.

A reviewer for Edmunds says the M9 is comparable to what you’d get for more than twice the price in the US.

But I think that’s underselling how left-behind US car buyers are becoming. And overcharged.

The BYD Great Tang SUV, for example, goes 620 miles on a single battery charge. In the US, the  longest-ranged car is the Lucid Air Grand Touring, which manages just 512 miles.

The Lucid Air starts at $138,000. The BYD costs $38,000.

The BYD also responds to voice commands. You can tell it to roll the windows down 25%, for example, or order a coffee at the next Starbucks for you. (And then to drive you there, of course.)

In a competitor's EV, you can even tell the car to turn itself into a bedroom (pictured above). 

“Transform your XPENG model's cabin into a comfortable, spacious sleeping area, allowing you to take a break and re-energize on long journeys,” their website says.

XPENG models start at $17,000.

XPENG’s come with an option to put a drone on the roof. Tell the car to launch and watch the drone’s video feed on your display — to scout the road ahead, perhaps, or look for people to shout at with your external speaker.

If you’re not the shouting type, the headlights on Huawei’s Aito M9 ($70,000) project pictures and messages on the road for people to look at as you cruise by.

You can also park and tell the car to project a movie onto a wall. Or a cricket match.

For city dwellers, BYD’s Denza Z9 GT ($40,000) can crab walk sideways into a tight parking space. It also does tank turns, rotating in place (just for fun, I guess).

The Denza Z convertible model ($125,000) goes from 0 to 60 mph in under two seconds.

BYD also offers LiDAR, the most advanced self-driving system, on its cheapest compact car, the Seagull, for $10,300.

The cheapest LiDAR option in the US is the Polestar 3 for $69,000.

Feeling deprived yet? Overcharged?

I’ve listed the prices in US dollars here to emphasize how overcharged US car buyers are. But dollars won’t buy them. You need Chinese yuan for that. 

Which makes me want yuan.

Historically, this is how currencies have gone international: people want the things they can buy with them.

The coincidence of yuan

In 2021, a Chinese trading company reportedly bartered $2 million of locally manufactured car parts for pistachios from Iran.

That's not how the modern economy is meant to work, of course. Barter limits trade to situations where each side happens to want exactly what the other has to offer — the famous “double coincidence of wants.”

The US dollar usually solves for this. Iran sells pistachios for dollars. China sells car parts for dollars. Each then spends the dollars on exactly what they want, because everything is buyable with dollars.

Chinese and Iranian traders were reduced to barter because 1) the US government had banished Iran from using dollars and 2) China has traditionally made it difficult for non-Chinese entities to use yuan.

But here’s something we’ve learned from the crisis in Iran: in response to the US making it harder to use dollars, China has made it easier to use yuan.

The Wall Street Journal reports that when a Chinese refiner buys oil from Iran, it can now pay in yuan, which are deposited in a financial entity known as Chuxin. The Chuxin then delivers the yuan to Chinese contractors who build infrastructure in Iran.

China gets oil. Iran gets airports. Everything is invoiced in yuan. 

The Journal reports as well that China has been routing payments for Iranian oil through special-purpose vehicles that allow Iran to buy Chinese consumer and manufacturing goods. 

Like cars, for example.

Which raises an obvious question: who still needs the dollar when yuan will buy you a self-driving SUV with a built-in karaoke machine and headlights that show movies?

China’s trade statistics show that fewer and fewer people think they do. More than half of the country’s cross-border transactions are now made in yuan, up from 0% in 2010.

Most of these are processed through China’s CIPS system — a kind of SWIFT, but for yuan — which began facilitating cross-border trade in 2015.

In 2021, China made things even easier by launching mBridge, which allows domestic and foreign banks to transfer digital versions of the yuan over a blockchain.

In 2026, Beijing took an even bigger step toward internationalization: allowing digital yuan held in Chinese banks to earn interest.

Trading partners like Iran can now earn a return on their yuan while they decide which model of Chinese car to buy, or what airport to build.

In other words, the yuan system is becoming a lot like the dollar system.

On a much smaller scale, though. “China has no intention of fully replacing the dollar with the yuan worldwide,” the Journal reports, because the government is not ready to relinquish its total control over the financial system by opening it to global money flows.

But money exists to eliminate coincidence of wants, and the yuan is getting better and better at that.

That’s not great news for the dollar, which became indispensable because the US had an open financial system and the world wanted things made in America. 

Now, the US financial system is becoming less open and the world wants more and more things made in China.

I can’t blame them.

What could be more want-inducing than a drone-carrying, crab-walking, movie-projecting, coffee-ordering SUV?

— Byron Gilliam