The Ruble, The Dollar And The Price Of Gold – Who Is Really Winning The Economic Chess Game?
Francesco Abbruzzino, The Uncensored Report, LLC
Russia has just made some moves that are going to change the global financial system forever. When the conflict in Ukraine originally erupted, the U.S. immediately attempted to crash the value of Russia’s currency. Those attempts were successful for a few days, but now the value of the ruble relative to the U.S. dollar is almost all the way back to where it was before the start of the war. This has absolutely stunned many of the experts, because they thought that U.S. sanctions would absolutely cripple Russia. So what happened? Well, it turns out that the Russians have made some very savvy moves that have turned the tables on the Biden administration.
For one thing, Russia has started to demand payment in rubles when it sells natural gas to non-friendly nations. A lot of countries in western Europe are quite upset about this, but they really have no choice, because they are exceedingly dependent on Russian gas. So from this point forward, western powers are actually going to be forced to help prop up the value of the ruble…
Russia wants “unfriendly countries” to pay for Russian natural gas in rubles. That’s a new directive from President Vladimir Putin as he attempts to leverage his country’s in-demand resources to counter a barrage of Western sanctions.
“I have decided to implement … a series of measures to switch payments — we’ll start with that — for our natural gas supplies to so-called unfriendly countries into Russian rubles,” Putin said in a televised government meeting, adding that trust in the dollar and euro had been “compromised” by the West’s seizure of Russian assets.
Secondly, the Russians have decided that U.S. dollars will no longer be accepted as payment for anything that they sell to other nations. Pavel Zavalny, the head of the Russian parliament, says that U.S. currency “has lost all interest for us”…
Much more interesting was Zavalny’s main point, even though it has been mostly overlooked. If other countries want to buy oil, gas, other resources or anything else from Russia, he said, “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.”
In other words, Russia is happy to accept your national currency — yuan, lira, ringgits or whatever — or rubles, or “hard currency,” and for them that no longer means U.S. dollars, it means gold.
“The dollar ceases to be a means of payment for us, it has lost all interest for us,” Zavalny added, calling the greenback no better than “candy wrappers.”
This is huge, but it isn’t being discussed much by the corporate media in the United States.
The Russians aren’t just saying that they do not recognize U.S. dollars as the reserve currency of the world any longer.
That would be bad enough.
At this point, they are actually saying that they will no longer accept U.S. dollars as a form of payment at all.
Wow.
Thirdly, the central bank in Russia has fixed the value of the ruble to the price of gold for at least the next three months…
The Russian central bank will restart buying gold from banks and will pay a fixed price of 5000 roubles ($52) per gramme between March 28 and June 30, the bank said on Friday.
But you won’t hear about this on CNN or MSNBC.