For
some time both China and the Russian Federation have understood, as do
other nations, that the role of the US dollar as the world’s major
reserve currency is their economic Achilles Heel. So long as Washington
and Wall Street control the dollar, and so long as the bulk of world
trade requires dollars for settlement, central banks like those of
Russia and China are forced to stockpile dollars in the form of “safe”
US Treasury debt, as currency reserves to protect their economies from
the kind of currency war Russia experienced in late 2014 when the
aptly-named US Treasury Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence
and Wall Street dumped rubles amid a US-Saudi deal to collapse world oil
prices. Now Russia and China are quietly heading for the dollar exit
door.
Russia’s state budget strongly depends
on oil export dollar profits. Ironically, because of the role of the
dollar, the central banks of China, Russia, Brazil and other countries
diametrically opposed to US foreign policy, are forced to buy US
Treasury debt in dollars, de facto financing the wars of Washington that
aim to damage them.
That’s quietly changing. In 2014 Russia
and China signed two mammoth 30-year contracts for Russian gas to China.
The contracts specified that the exchange would be done in Renminbi and
Russian rubles, not in dollars. That was the beginning of an
accelerating process of de-dollarization that is underway today.
Renminbi in Russian Reserves
On November 27, Russia’s Central Bank
announced that it was including the Chinese Renminbi into the central
bank’s official reserves for the first time. As of December 31, 2014,
official Central Bank of Russia reserves consisted of 44% US dollars,
and 42% Euros with the British Pound slightly more than 9%. The decision
to include Renminbi or Yuan into Russia’s official reserves will
increase the use of the yuan in Russian financial markets, to the
detriment of the dollar.
The yuan first began to be traded as a
currency, even though it is not yet fully convertible into other
currencies, in the Moscow Exchange in 2010. Since then the volume of
yuan-ruble trades has grown enormously. In August, 2015 Russian currency
traders and companies bought a record 18 billion yuan, about $3
billion, representing a 400% increase from a year earlier.
The Golden Ruble is coming
But the actions of Russia and China to
replace the dollar as mediating currency in their mutual trade, a trade
whose volume has grown significantly since US and EU sanctions in March
2014, are not the end of it.
Gold is about to make a dramatic return
to the world monetary stage for the first time since Washington
unilaterally ripped up the Bretton Woods Treaty in August, 1971. At that
point, advised by David Rockefeller’s personal emissary in the
Treasury, Paul Volcker, Niixon announced Waahinton was refusing to honor
its treaty obligations to redeem the dollars held abroad for US central
bank gold.
Since that time, rumors have persisted
that, in fact, the gold chambers of Fort Knox are bare, a fact that,
were it to be verified, would spell curtains for the dollar as reserve
currency.
Washington adamantly holds to the story
line that the Federal Reserve sits on 8133 tons of gold reserves. If
true, that would far exceed the second-largest, Germany, whose official
gold holdings are listed by the IMF at 3381 tons.
In 2014 a bizarre event transpired which
fed the doubts about US official gold statistics. In 2012 the German
Government asked the Federal Reserve to return German central bank gold
“held in custody” for the Bundesbank by the Fed. Shocking the world, the
US central bank refused to give Germany her gold back, using the flimsy
excuse that the Federal Reserve “could not differentiate German gold
bars from US ones…” Perhaps we are to believe the auditors of US Federal
Reserve gold were laid off in the US budget cuts?
In the ensuing scandal, in 2013 the US
repatriated a measly 5 tons of German gold to Frankfurt and announced it
would need until 2020 to complete the requested 300 tons repatriation.
Other European central banks began demanding their gold from the Fed, as
distrust of the US central bank grew.
Into this dynamic the central bank of
Russia has been adding to its official gold reserves in dramatic fashion
in recent years. Since the growing hostility with Washington the pace
has become far more rapid. From January 2013, Russia’s official gold has
expanded by 129% to 1352 tons as of September 30, 2015. In 2000 at the
end of the decade of US-backed plunder of the Russian Federation during
the dark Yeltsin years of the 1990s Russia’s gold reserves stood at 343 tons.
The vaults of the Russian Central Bank,
which at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 held some
2,000 tons of official gold, had been stripped during the controversial
tenure of Gosbank head, Viktor Gerashchenko, who told a startled Duma
that he could not account for the whereabouts of the Russian gold.
Today is a different era to be sure.
Russia has far and away replaced South Africa as the world’s third
largest gold mining country in terms of annual tons mined. China has
become number one.
Western media has made much of the fact
that since US-led financial sanctions, Russian central bank reserves of
dollars have fallen significantly. What they do not report is that at
the same time the central bank in Russia has been buying gold, lots of
gold. Russia’s total reserves in US dollars have fallen recently under
sanctions by some $140 billion since 2014 parallel with the 50% collapse
in dollar oil prices, but holdings of gold are up by 30% since 2014 as
noted. Russia now holds as many ounces of gold as the gold
exchange-traded funds (ETFs) do. In June alone, it added the equivalent
of 12% of global annual gold mine production according to seekingalpha.com.
Were the Russian government to adopt the
very sensible proposal of Russian economist and Putin adviser, Sergei
Glazyev, namely that the Central Bank of Russia buy every single ounce
of Russian mined gold at a guaranteed attractive ruble price to increase
state gold holdings, that would even more avoid the Central Bank having
to buy the gold on international markets for dollars.
A Bankrupt Hegemon
At the close of the 1980’s as they
viewed a major US banking crisis coupled with the clear decline in the
postwar role of the United States as the world’s industrial leading
nation, as US multinationals out-sourced to low-wage countries like
Mexico and later China, Europeans began to conceive of a new currency to
replace the dollar as reserve and creation of a United States of Europe
to rival US hegemony. The European response was creation of the
Maastricht Treaty at the moment of the reunification of Germany in the
beginning of the 1990’s. The European Central Bank and later the Euro, a
severely flawed top-down construction, was the result. A suspiciously
successful bet in billions by New York hedge fund speculator George
Soros in 1992 against the Bank of England and the parity of the Pound,
managed to knock the UK and the City of London out of the emerging EU
alternative to the dollar. It was easy pickings for some of the same
hedge funds to tear the Euro at the seams in 2010 by attacking its
Achilles Heel, Greece, followed by Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Spain.
Since then the EU, which is bound to Washington as well via the chains
of NATO, has posed little threat to American hegemony.
However, increasingly since 2010, as
Washington attempted to impose the Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance on
the world in the form of the so-called Arab Spring manipulated regime
changes from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya and now, with poor results, in
Syria, China and Russia have both been pushed into each others’ arms. A
Russian-Chinese alternative to the dollar in the form of a gold-backed
ruble and gold-backed renminbi or yuan, could start a snowball exit from
the US dollar, and with it, a severe decline in America’s ability to
use the reserve dollar role to finance her wars with other peoples’
money. That could just give the interests in favor of a world at peace a
huge advantage over that warring lost hegemon, the United States.
F. William Engdahl is
strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics
from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and
geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
05.12.2015
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