Eurasia note #40 - Gold Rouble vs. Central Bank Digital Currency

Russia's tolerance of The Great Reset is looking less likely by the day

Russia pegs rouble to gold, throwing down gauntlet to central bankers.
Move anticipates Central Bank Digital Currency with in-your-face slapdown.
As rising fuel costs impact people’s capacity to meet higher food prices...
Western digital currencies increasingly look like a tool to coordinate food rationing.
Centralized control of spending is an unprecedented step in surveillance.
(3,000 words or 15 minutes’ read.)

Tbilisi, April 4, 2022

I have no idea who’s the good guy. Pesident Putin has taken the one step that chills suspicions you might have that Russia plays a central role in the globalist camp.

By linking the rouble to gold, he has directly challenged the private owners of the Western central banks. Men have died for less. Gaddafi was bayonetted and the head of the French oil giant Total burned in his jet.

The challenge resounds from the hallowed halls of the Rothschilds’ Waddesdon Manor, to the airless rooms of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington DC and to the former-Nazi Bank for International Settlements in Basle.

Since the start of war in Ukraine we have argued that Russia’s strategy is qualitatively different from the lockstep of Western nations.

It is the move to link the currency to gold, however, which is likely to have the private owners of central banks seething. Ever since the central banks embarked on their money creation spree after the mortgage-backed securities fraud of 2008, they have denied that inflation would result from their printing oodles of cash to prop up asset prices and stop banks and pension funds going bust.

One of their tricks to hide inflation was to hold down the price of gold. Putin has exposed that policy by putting a floor under the gold price which now, at 5000 roubles per gram, can rise with the Russian currency, which in turn reflects the oil price.

It’s not a one-way bet but it’s a lot closer to transparency in the metals market than we have had for a long time.

Inflation is now upon us — and it’s much worse than the official statistics suggest. Hard assets, such as gold and silver, should have jumped by more than the paper-based trading on the COMEX (part of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange) has done. [1]

As Ronan Manly points out, if the bankers want to drive down gold, they now have to drive down the rouble, too — and that reflects the oil price. [2]

Russia’s move straddles the commodities and gold markets. It cannot corner the market but it becomes king-maker as it accounts for such a large proportion of the market for oil, gas, fertilizer, minerals and metals and now makes a brazen play to use them to support its currency. It also has an ace in China which is a major consumer of exactly those products: together they constitute pitcher, batter and backstop.

Proposing to link a regional currency to gold is what got Muammar Gaddafi killed. When Christophe de Margerie, the CEO of Total, in 2014 met then Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev to discuss trading oil in gold, upon leaving the meeting his jet failed to get airborne and he died on the Vnukovo runway. A former KGB operative told Moneycircus that de Margerie was certainly assassinated — and not by Russians.

What about that other talisman of The Great Reset, a central bank digital currency linked to a biometric identity? The gold rouble tries to have it both ways. It stands a good chance of becoming the new monetary order as much of the world’s productive capacity collapses under the pressure of inflation. On the other hand, being linked not just to metal but indirectly to Russia’s commodity behemoth, it is similar to the resource-linked currency that the central bankers imagine.

Remember, any currency can be digital. The point about the CBDC is that it will provide, via blockchain, a record — and control — over how it is spent.

Any currency that is a credit for energy used or carbon created, is a voucher in the company store. Anyone whose entitlement to use said scrip depends on being branded with a digital identity is a slave.

Background noise

On Feb 24, 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine we wrote:

The heart of president Vladimir Putin’s argument is the people: that Ukraine has failed its own population, economically and morally, whipping up a Nazi form of nationalism to pit them against those who are, historically, their own family.

To Western technocrats this will sound like populist rhetoric. Is there a role for “the Narod” in this argument? It is the explicit policy of the European Union and the United Nations to dilute culture and individual identity, which they see as a threat to communitarianism.

At the same time we argued:

Russia is on board with The Great Reset, proposed by the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. It broached the project’s goals before many Western countries. Former president Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, headed up the country's innovation drive.

And finally we noted:

The Ukraine war is symmetrical with The Great Reset which shutters the messy small and mid-size businesses in the goal of a streamlined, centralized, corporate state.

See Moneycircus, Feb 24, 2022 — Eurasia note #23 - Russia Intervenes in Ukraine: The first war of The Great Reset dovetails with globalist objectives

The point is not forecasting or reading of tea leaves, which is a mugs’ claim, as the author knows having been a financial reporter for 30-plus years. But having reported from Russia during its economic crisis of 1998 and from Moscow for 10 years since the mid-2000s, certain strands are evident..

Russia is very close in state-as-concept to France, whose revolution the Bolsheviks largely copied. The proposals which seem new to the West are bread and butter to Russians, such as requirng residence permits that tie a person to city and place of work, and a state surveillance network that retains much of its Soviet intrusiveness.

What his means is that Russia may pursue apparent Reset-like measures, such as green passports, without missing a beat — and while pursues independent national interests. Those interests are very different from those espoused by the European aristocrats who lead the European Union — don’t listen to me: hear them!

Granted, aspects of the war in Ukraine look staged. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen prepared sanctions against Russia last November.

But those who want to see a single team marching towards a Great Reset have to notice now that Putin has planted his standard in the chernozem or the black earth of Ukraine.

If he has stashed away the wealth that the Western press claims, that money is Switzerland and Europe where it can be impounded. Owner of Chelsea football club Roman Abramovich is widely suspected to be a front — ever since his performance in his court case against Boris Berezovsky in which he demonstrated a lack of detailed business knowledge raising questions about the origins of his wealth matched only by Jeffrey Epstein. Abramovich also owns a fleet of five yachts.

Russia roundtable

Off-Guardian recently hosted an instructive roundtable with Whitney Webb’s UnLimited Hangout.

Although intended to address whether the war in Ukraine is a continuation of Covid — to which Moneycircus answers, yes — the debate displayed just how big and broad is the topic (the reason why articles here take a discursive approach, attempting to build understanding like a bricklayer: the reader will not find flat-pack, quick-assemble IKEA explanations, however frustrating that is.)

The debate revealed how prevalent, yet needless is disagreement on The Great Reset:

• What is The Great Reset (TGR)?

• Do Russia and China take part?

• Has Russia been manhandled into the conflict, and thus into the Reset?

Some contributors, in my opinion, displayed lack of knowledge of Russia’s recent history.

For example, when Putin “fired” the oligarchs, it was not about replacing one set of oligarchs with another. It was his “offer you can't refuse” to stay out of politics or lose your business — as the FSB/Siloviki did to Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

But the history that caused that move was the Harvard team of “advisors” in the time of president Boris Yeltsin who plainly intended to use dual-national oligarchs to seize by criminal means, the most valuable assets of Russia, while using the proceeds of that wealth to control the political scene.

Look at Ukraine? Is that not what has happened?

See Moneycircus, Jan 27, 2022 — Eurasia Note #19 - Ukraine: Just Bizniz for Some: Claiming to defend a country, while looting it, has a touch of depravity

The Russian central bank is said to be 49 per cent controled by the Rothschilds. Though the author has interviewed the head of Russia’s central bank this cannot be confirmed — it is a territory the state-corporatist media refuses to tread.

We shall find out soon for the corollary of Putin’s return to the gold standard is an irrevocable break with the Western central bankers.

See Moneycircus, Dec 4, 2021 — Bankers Prance To War And Slavery: 'If there must be trouble, let it be in my day'

And now a musical break… NWO style.

The panel misses one definition of technocracy as the abandonment of humanity in making decisions. Matthew Ehret gets close.

A cynic might note that ideas already in the public zone escape objection while those still hostage to dispute are shot down.

So the statement that biolabs may have targeted racial characteristics which both Russia and China has been watching for decades are allowed. But when Tom Luongo points out that the way to put pressure on capital markets in the West might be to shut down the supply chains in China, the tenor goes ballistic, painting Luongo as believing China is out to save the world — that only one camp might be working for legitimate security reasons, the others seeking to undermine their rivals — yet both implementing the same one-world cybernetic governance.

Lived experience