Tag Archives: Gold

Russia Is Quietly Making The Case For Owning Gold, by Schiffgold

Posted on April 5, 2022 | Leave a comment

The Russian government and its central bank prefer to use a medium of exchange that can’t be “cancelled” by a foreign government or central bank. From Schiffgold at schiffgold.com:

Russia has quietly made the case for owning gold.

The head of the Russian Parliament, Pavel Zavalny, made comments recently addressing the subject of economic and financial sanctions. It’s clear that gold is playing a large role in protecting Russian wealth. That role may get bigger and it could create a paradigm shift in how the world does business.

Russia has a lot of natural gas and oil. And it sells a lot of natural gas and oil to the world. Zavalny made it clear that Russia is happy to sell — in hard currency. And what is hard currency? Not dollars.

If they want to buy, let them pay either in hard currency, and this is gold for us, or pay as it is convenient for us, this is the national currency. As for friendly countries, China or Turkey, which are not involved in the sanctions pressure. We have been proposing to China for a long time to switch to settlements in national currencies for rubles and yuan. With Turkey, it will be lira and rubles. The set of currencies can be different and this is normal practice. You can also trade bitcoins.”

Zavalny said Russia has no interest in dollars, saying “this currency turns into candy wrappers for us.”

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Russian Ruble relaunched linked to Gold and Commodities – RT.com Q and A, by Ronan Manly

Posted on April 4, 2022 | Leave a comment

The Russian central bank is attempting to put a floor under the price of gold and the exchange value of the Russian ruble. From Ronan Manly at bullionstar.com:

With Russia’s central bank having just profoundly altered the international trade and monetary system by linking the Russian ruble to both gold and commodities, the journalists at in Moscow asked me to write a Q and A article on what these developments mean, and the ramifications of these changes on the Russian ruble, the US dollar, the gold price and the global system of currencies. This article has been published on the RT.com website.

Regular readers will recall that I have contributed to quite a few RT.com articles before, such as about Australian gold (see BullionStar), US Treasury gold (see BullionStar ), Poland’s gold (see RT site ), China’s gold (see RT’s Spanish site ), why buy physical gold (see RT site ), and gold price manipulation (see RT site).

However, since RT.com is now blocked and censored in many Western locations such as the EU, UK, US and Canada, and since many readers may not be able to access the RT.com website (unless using a VPN), my Questions and Answers that are in the new RT.com article are now published here in their entirety.

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Edging towards a gold standard, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on April 1, 2022 | Leave a comment

The Ukraine-Russia war is become as much a financial as a military war, if not more so. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

Commentators are trying to make sense of Russian moves. However, there is a back story which differs from much of the speculation, which this article addresses.

The Russians have not put the rouble on some sort of gold standard. Instead, they have repeated the Nixon/Kissinger strategy which created the petrodollar in 1973 by getting the Saudis to agree to accept only dollars for oil. This time, nations deemed by Russia to be unfriendly will be forced to buy roubles – roughly 2 trillion by the EU alone based on last year’s natural gas and oil imports from Russia — driving up the exchange rate. The rouble has now doubled against the dollar from its low point of RUB 150 to RUB 75 yesterday in just over three weeks. The Russian Central Bank will soon be able to normalise the domestic economy by reducing interest rates and removing exchange controls

The Russians and Chinese will be acutely aware that Western currencies, particularly the yen and euro, are likely to be undermined by recent developments. The financial war, which has always been in the background, is emerging into plain sight and becoming a battlefield between fiat currencies, and it is full on.

The winner by default is almost certainly gold, now the only reliable reserve asset for those not aligned with Russia’s “unfriendlies”. But it is still a long way from backing any currency.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Eurasian Axis, Financial markets, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, War

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#GotGoldorRubles? Russia Just Broke the Back of the West, by Tom Luongo

Posted on March 28, 2022 | Leave a comment

U.S. debt, epitomized by its flagship Federal Reserve Note, has become America’s Achilles heel. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

I don’t think everyone has yet caught the significance of Russia announcing they are putting a floor under the price of gold.  But, to be clear, Russia just broke the paper gold suppression scheme.

On Friday the Bank of Russia announced:

RUB5000 to the ounce at an exchange rate of 100 RUB/USD implies a $1550 per ounce gold price.

For a few days previous to this announcement, which they knew was coming, The West was running around with multiple bits of legislation to try and keep the Russians from selling their gold.

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Designing a new currency is impractical, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on March 25, 2022 | Leave a comment

Governments and central banks are trying to do a currency shuffle into central bank digital currencies, but fiat is still fiat. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

Rising interest rates threaten to destabilise both financial asset values and the fiat currencies in which they are priced. This outcome is feared by the chattering classes who increasingly speculate about currency resets.

So far, we have seen cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, plans for the introduction of central bank digital currencies, plans to de-dollarise Asian trade, and even El Salvador adopting bitcoin as legal tender. But are these resets valid?

Except for a new currency mooted for cross-border trading purposes between Russia, its former Central Asian satellites and China only at the conceptual stage, all these plans fail in one important respect: as things stand, legally none of them can have the status of a currency. Money, that is physical gold and silver, banknotes and bank credit are exempt from property law with respect to stolen goods which otherwise can be seized from innocent parties who have subsequently acquired them.

Without this exemption embodied in lex mercatoria a currency replacement is useless. The only replacement for fiat is a currency credibly backed by gold. And that is the legal position!

Introduction

The introduction of new currencies is a topic moving increasingly into public debate driven by both the inflation dilemma faced by central banks and, recently, by the consequences of fiat currency sanctions against Russia. There is a convergence of events at play. While there are the immediate problems of rising interest rates and of the financial and commodity price war being waged between the West and Russia, there are plans for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to give the monetary authorities greater control over the use of new currencies that could replace existing fiat.

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The evolution of credit, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on March 18, 2022 | 2 comments

The West’s fiat currencies are reaching the end of the line. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

After fifty-one years from the end of the Bretton Woods Agreement, the system of fiat currencies appears to be moving towards a crisis point for the US dollar as the international currency. The battle over global energy, commodity, and grain supplies is the continuation of an intensifying financial war between the dollar and the renminbi and rouble.

It is becoming clear that the scale of an emerging industrial revolution in Asia is in stark contrast with Western decline, a population ratio of 87 to 13. The dollar’s role as the sole reserve currency is not suited for this reality.

Commentators speculate that the current system’s failings require a global reset. They think in terms of it being organised by governments, when the governments’ global currency system is failing. Beholden to Keynesian macroeconomics, the common understanding of money and credit is lacking as well.

This article puts money, currency, and credit, and their relationships in context. It points out that the credit in an economy is far greater than officially recorded by money supply figures and it explains how relatively small amounts of gold coin can stabilise an entire credit system.

It is the only lasting solution to the growing fiat money crisis, and it is within the power of at least some central banks to implement gold coin standards by mobilising their reserves.

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Posted in Banking, Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Financial markets, Geopolitics, Governments, War

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Say Hello to Russian Gold and Chinese Petroyuan, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on March 16, 2022 | Leave a comment

The U.S. government is pushing Russia and China away from using the dollar and undermining its reserve currency status. From Pepe Escobar at unz.com:

Russia says half its gold assets were frozen – is this for real or a slick play by Moscow?

It was a long time coming, but finally some key lineaments of the multipolar world’s new foundations are being revealed.

On Friday, after a videoconference meeting, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and China agreed to design the mechanism for an independent international monetary and financial system. The EAEU consists of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia, is establishing free trade deals with other Eurasian nations, and is progressively interconnecting with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

For all practical purposes, the idea comes from Sergei Glazyev, Russia’s foremost independent economist, a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin and the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the regulatory body of the EAEU.

Glazyev’s central role in devising the new Russian and Eurasian economic/financial strategy has been examined here. He saw the western financial squeeze on Moscow coming light-years before others.

Quite diplomatically, Glazyev attributed the fruition of the idea to “the common challenges and risks associated with the global economic slowdown and restrictive measures against the EAEU states and China.”

Translation: as China is as much a Eurasian power as Russia, they need to coordinate their strategies to bypass the US unipolar system.

The Eurasian system will be based on “a new international currency,” most probably with the yuan as reference, calculated as an index of the national currencies of the participating countries, as well as commodity prices. The first draft will be already discussed by the end of the month.

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Climbing the Escalation Ladder in the Economic War With Russia… Here’s the Nuclear Option, by Nick Giambruno

Posted on March 15, 2022 | Leave a comment

For the world’s reserve currency, gold is definitely a four-letter word. From Nick Giaumbruno at internationalman.com:

Russia

The escalation ladder is a concept to describe how the severity of a military conflict can increase.

At the very top of the escalation ladder is all-out nuclear war.

While there are numerous countries with nuclear weapons, Russia and China are the only ones with sophisticated enough arsenals to go toe-to-toe with the US up to the top of the escalation ladder.

In other words, the US can’t obtain escalation dominance against Russia or China because they can match each escalation up to all-out nuclear war—the very top of the ladder.

For this reason, these countries are deterred from getting into a kinetic conflict with one another.

It’s also why the US military doesn’t hesitate to bomb countries like Libya, Iraq, Syria, or Afghanistan. It has little to fear because it knows these countries can’t climb very high in the escalation ladder.

This concept is well-understood in military conflicts.

However, the same dynamic exists in an economic war, and it’s far less understood by governments (and investors).

That’s why neither the US nor Russia are not deterred and are climbing up the economic escalation ladder and hurdling towards an increasingly imminent catastrophe.

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Fiat Currencies Are Going To “Fail Spectacularly”: Lawrence Lepard, by QTR Fringe Finance

Posted on March 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

Fiat currencies have already failed spectacularly. The dollar is worth about 2 percent of what it was when the Federal Reserve began in 1913. The debasement picked up speed after Nixon cut the last vestige of the gold standard in 1971. Fiat currencies always fail, and for the same reasons. From QTR Fringe Finance via zerohedge.com:

Friend of Fringe Finance Lawrence Lepard released his most recent investor letter a few weeks ago with his updated take on the monetary miasma spreading across the globe.

Larry had joined me for several interviews last year and I believe him to truly be one of the muted voices that the investing community would be better off for considering. He’s the type of voice that gets little coverage in the mainstream media, which, in my opinion, makes him someone worth listening to twice as closely.

Lawrence Lepard (Photo: Kitco)

Larry was kind enough to allow me to share his thoughts heading into 2022.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Larry predicted that a “crack up boom” could be on its way and also offered his take on gold, inflation, monetary policy, bitcoin, fiscal policy, the ongoing supply chain crunch, and much, much more. That analysis is included.

Now, the invasion of Ukraine has helped catalyze a number of his predicted scenarios.

Here are several Fringe Finance excerpts from Larry’s thoughts on the Ukraine invasion and the markets heading into 2022, from prior to the invasion.

Russia Invading Ukraine Has Caused A ‘Monetary Earthquake’

What just happened in the last two weeks is enormously important and misunderstood by many investors.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the corresponding Western sanctions and seizure of Russian FX reserves are nothing short of a monetary earthquake. The last comparable event was Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard in 1971.

Russia, with the backing and support of China, just told the world that it is no longer going to sell its oil, gas and wheat for Western currencies which are programmed to debase.

The West in its response just said to all countries around the world: “If you have foreign exchange reserves, held in our system, they are no longer safe if we disagree with your politics.”

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Posted in Banking, Business, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Energy, Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, War

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A Global Monetary & Commodity Inferno of Nuclear Proportions, by Egon von Greyerz

Posted on March 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

The world is going up in monetary smoke. From Egon von Greyerz at goldswitzerland.com:

When the sh-t hits the global fan, it often does it at the optimal time for the maximum amount of damage and with the worst kind of sh-t to soil the world.

For years I have been clear that the world is reaching the end of an economic, financial and monetary era which will affect mankind catastrophically for decades.

The world will obviously blame Putin for the catastrophe which will hit every corner of our planet. But we must remember that neither Putin nor Covid is the reason for the economic cataclysm that we are now approaching.

These events are catalysts which will have a major effect because they are hitting a gigantic debt bubble of a magnitude that has never been seen before in history. And it obviously takes very little to prick this epic bubble.

What is unequivocal is that all currencies will finish the 100+ year fall to ZERO in the next few years. It is also crystal clear that all the asset bubbles – stocks, bonds and property – will implode at the same time leading to a long and deep depression.

We had the warning in 2006-9 but central banks ignored it and just added new worthless debt to existing worthless debt to create worthless debt squared – an obvious recipe for disaster.

So as is often typical for the end of an economic era, the catalyst is totally unexpected and worse than anyone could have forecast.

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