"Russia on Thursday said it would ditch all U.S. dollar assets in its National Wealth Fund (NWF) and increase holdings in euros, Chinese yuan and gold in what analysts said was a political move ahead of a presidential Russia-U.S. summit later this month," Reuters noted last week amid ongoing reports in the U.S. that the inflation we're seeing now is not at all "transitory" and is much more severe than the liars in power are letting on.
"Tim Ash at BlueBay Asset Management said the move was designed to send a signal ahead of a summit between President Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden on June 16," Reuters reported.
Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum recently, "Like the central bank, we have decided to reduce investments of the NWF in dollar assets."
The divestment of U.S. dollars by Russia isn't new, actually. Moscow has been ditching dollars for years now, beginning in the wake of its invasion of the Crimea in 2014 and following the imposition of economic sanctions by then-president Barack Obama.
By last year, in fact, Moscow had already dumped something close to 96 percent of dollar assets, as RT.com reported in May 2020:
Russia’s holdings of US state debt amounted to $3.8 billion in March, compared with $12.5 billion a month earlier. Three years ago, the amount stood at $105 billion. Moscow has liquidated over 96 percent of its holdings in that period. The country’s long-term US Treasury securities decreased by $928 million, while short-term securities plunged by $7.8 billion to just $473 million.
Japan remains the largest holder of U.S. debt at about $1.27 trillion; China, believe it or not, is the second-largest single holder of U.S. debt, but like Russia, Beijing has also started to divest itself from the dollar.
"As a matter of state policy, Moscow has also been diversifying its reserves, increasing bullion purchases to record levels, and earning the title of the world’s most committed purchaser of gold," RT.com reported, adding that, at the time, Russia held close to $120 billion of gold.
“The rest of the world has also sharply reduced the dollar share of FX reserves over the past two decades but Russia has a special interest in doing so quickly and undermining global confidence in the dollar because it is a petro-state and a strategic rival of the United States,” Matt Gertken, a geopolitical strategist at BCA Research in Montreal, told Reuters, adding that he didn't believe Russia would get rid of all of its dollars because "that would be a foolish financial decision.”
Really?
Financial analyst Peter Schiff noted in a report this week that the economic situation in the United States under Biden is getting worse -- it's going the opposite direction our country went under President Donald Trump. Noting "that the economy is far weaker than anybody is admitting," he talked about a "double whammy" involving rising inflation while Biden's Fed continues to print money.
"There is a glut of dollars on the market and so the value of those dollars is going to go down," Schiff said. "The weaker the economy is the more money the Federal Reserve prints to artificially stimulate it. That is inflation. So, the longer the Fed continues to print money, the more upward pressure is put on prices."
"As people are not productively employed, they are producing fewer goods or providing fewer services for people to buy. And then the Fed simply creates money for those people to spend. So, in a weak economy, you have two things happening at the same time. You have more money being created out of thin air and given to Americans to go out and buy stuff. But at the same time, fewer Americans are actually working to produce the stuff to buy," he continued.
Boom: Instant recipe for inflation and a resultant crash.
Vladimir Putin knows what he's doing because he knows what's coming.
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