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With Russia’s central bank having just profoundly altered the international trade and monetary system by linking the Russian ruble to both gold and commodities, journalists in Moscow asked me to write a Q and A article on what these developments mean, and the ramifications of these changes on the Russian ruble, the US dollar, the gold price and the global system of currencies. This article has been published on the RT.com website here.

Since RT.com is now blocked and censored in many Western locations such as the EU, UK, US and Canada, and since many readers may not be able to access the RT.com website (unless using a veepPeeEnn), my Questions and Answers that are in the new RT.com article are now published here in their entirety.

Who would have thought that citizens of ‘free speech’ Western countries would need a VveePeeEnn to read a Russian news site?

Why is setting a Fixed Price for Gold in Rubles significant?

By offering to buy gold from Russian banks at a fixed price of 5000 rubles per gram, the Bank of Russia has both linked the ruble to gold and, since gold trades in US dollars, set a floor price for the ruble in terms of the US dollar.

We can see this linkage in action since Friday 25 March when the Bank of Russia made the fixed price announcement. The ruble was trading at around 100 to the US dollar at that time, but has since strengthened and is nearing 80 to the US dollar. Why? Because gold has been trading on international markets at about US$ 62 per gram which is equivalent to (5000 / 62) = about 80.5, and markets and arbitrage traders have now taken note, driving the RUB / USD exchange rate higher.

So the ruble now has a floor to the US dollars, in terms of gold. But gold also has a floor, so to speak, because 5000 rubles per gram is 155,500 rubles per troy ounce of gold, and with a RUB / USD floor of about 80, that’s a gold price of around $1940. And if the Western paper gold markets of LBMA / COMEX try to drive the US dollar gold price lower, they will have to try to weaken the ruble as well or else the paper manipulations will be out in the open.

Additionally, with the new gold to ruble linkage, if the ruble continues to strengthen (for example due to demand created by obligatory energy payments in rubles), this will also be reflected in a stronger gold price.


What does this mean for the US Dollar?