Putin Declares An End To Western Currencies

Russia’s Putin declares an end to Western currencies, says world moving towards “real reserves” including “land, food, gold”

JD Heyes 

Russian President Vladimir Putin is predicting that the world will move away from the U.S.-dominated financial system after Washington, along with Western governments, seized his country’s currency assets as part of their sanctions for invading Ukraine.

In a video posted to social media, Putin blasted the “theft” of Moscow’s resources and mocked the notion that first-world currency reserve holders are “reliable.”

“Let me reiterate, the whole global economy and trade have suffered a major blow, as did the trust in the U.S. dollar as the main reserve currency” of the world, the Russian leader says in a translated clip.

“The illegitimate freezing of some of the currency reserves of the Bank of Russia marks the end of the reliability of so-called first-class assets,” he added. “In fact, the U.S. and EU have defaulted on their obligations to Russia. Now everybody knows that financial reserves can simply be stolen.”

He added: “And many countries in the immediate future may begin — I am sure this is what will happen — to convert their paper and digital assets into raw reserves of raw materials” such as “land, food, gold, and other real assets.”

Astute economic analysts foresee a world coming soon which will once again be dominated by hard currencies like gold and silver, as well as other precious metals, in addition to physical assets like land and food because paper fiat currencies and ‘virtual’ currencies like bitcoin are not just increasingly unreliable, they can be — as Putin said — simply stolen from the owner as if they never really belonged to someone else.

Brett Arends, writing in MarketWatch, picked up on something that a leading Russian official said last week that Putin alluded to in his speech.

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