China is pushing its trade counterparties to accept Chinese yuan as payment for goods and services. The yuan is a small part of global payments today (about 2%) but the yuan may get a boost as the U.S. sanctions on Iran kick in.
China is Iran’s biggest customer for oil, and if U.S. sanctions prohibit dollar payments for Iranian oil, then Iran and China may have no choice but to transact in yuan.
The International Monetary Fund, IMF, has already announced efforts to put its world money, the special drawing right, SDR, on a distributed ledger. This would make the SDR a global cryptocurrency for settling balance of payments transactions among China, Russia and other IMF members, also without reliance on the dollar payments system.
Alongside the new money in cryptocurrencies, there is the oldest form of money, which is gold. The use of gold is the ideal way to avoid U.S. financial warfare.
Gold is physical so it cannot be hacked. It is completely fungible (an element, atomic number 79) so it cannot be traced. Gold can be transported in sealed containers on airplanes so movements cannot be identified through wire transfer message traffic or satellite surveillance.
There is good evidence that Iran currently pays for North Korean weapons technology with gold, and good reason to expect that future Chinese payments for Iranian oil will be made at least partly in gold.
Imagine a three-way trade in which North Korea sells weapons to Iran, Iran sells oil to China and China sells food to North Korea. All of these transactions can be recorded on a blockchain and netted out on a quarterly basis with the net settlement payment made in gold shipped to the party with the net balance due. That’s a glimpse of what a future nondollar payments system looks like.
Finally, look at the evidence presented in Chart 1 below. This shows Russia’s reserve position from 2013–18. The reserve position collapsed from $540 billion to $350 billion as a result of the oil price crash beginning in late 2014. (And query whether the oil price collapse itself was engineered by the U.S. in retaliation for Russia’s annexation of Crimea).
Since early 2015, Russia has rebuilt its reserve position under the patient stewardship of Russian Central Bank head Elvira Nabiullina. Russian reserves are now back up to $460 billion and rising steadily.
Yet there’s one huge difference between Russian reserves in 2014 and those reserves today. That difference is gold. During the reserve collapse in 2014, Russia sold U.S. dollar assets as needed to maintain liquidity, but it never stopped buying gold.
Russian gold reserves rose from 1,275 tons in mid-2015 (near the reserve low) to 1,909 tons at the end of April 2018. That’s a 50% increase in gold reserves in less than three years. Using current market prices, the Russia gold hoard is worth about $90 billion, or 20% of Russia’s global reserve position.
Why would a country put 20% of its reserves into gold unless it expected gold to be a major part of the international monetary system in the future? It wouldn’t. Russia not only expects gold to be part of the system, it is in strong position to make that happen by working with China, Turkey and Iran in what I call the new “Axis of Gold.”
The bottom line is that the weaponized dollar will soon be a victim of its own success. While the U.S. was bullying the world with dollars, the world was quietly preparing a new nondollar system. The U.S. wanted diplomatic and military clout and it got it with the dollar.
But as the saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.”
Wise investors will prepare now for a new nondollar payments system. You may not be able to buy crypto SDRs (yet), but you can certainly own gold, and you should.
- Source, Jim Rickards
