Russia will put an end to the US dollar as the reserve currency

INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC STRATEGIES 

The act of the West’s economic war against the currency assets of the Central Bank of Russia threatens the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, foreign analysts warn. Reuters finance and markets editor-in-chief Mike Dolan writes about this, in particular.

According to him, such a step made by the West posed a question to central banks around the world: why to keep foreign currency at all ($12.83 trillion worldwide by the end of 2021, 60% of which are US dollars), if it can be easily taken away from you?

One of the obvious alternatives to the dollar may be the Chinese yuan (it accounts for 2.7% of world gold reserves), Dolan believes. At the same time, China itself has already accumulated about $3.22 trillion, on which, in addition, it has nothing to spend it, given its huge trade surplus with the United States. 

Professor Barry Eichengreen from Berkeley also believes that the most important of the two functions of foreign exchange reserves around the world – to serve as insurance in case of cataclysms – is now ceasing to operate. Former Goldman Sachs global economist Jim O’Neill also agrees that everything leads to a serious reform of the global financial system and a departure from the focus on the United States.

“This card [with the gold reserves of Russia] can be played only once,” the head of Calderwood Capital, Dylan Grice, is sure. “Now China, before taking Taiwan, will refuse to bet on the dollar. This is a turning point in monetary history.”

But the most striking opinion comes from Credit Suisse analyst Zoltan Pozsar. According to him, Russia is able to launch a sequence of events that will lead to the disappearance of the dollar as a reserve currency in general. 

Speaking on Bloomberg, Pozsar said that it is useless to accumulate reserves in dollars now, because they can be taken away from you exactly when you need them most. And Russia is not the only example here: most recently, the Biden administration seized the assets of Afghanistan in the same way.

All this, according to Pozsar, leads not just to the rejection of the dollar, but to a new currency order, when countries will be much less connected by international bank accounts and reserves. In the case of Russia, it goes to the gold ruble, which will be provided with its own gold. And China can follow the same path to the gold yuan.

Of course, there is too little physical gold on the planet to transfer all foreign exchange reserves into it at its current price, analysts agree. But this pushes the planet to the only and inevitable way out – a sharp rise in the price of “royal metal”.

Source: https://russtrat.ru/en/comments_/5-march-2022-0307-9175