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Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina suggested on Tuesday that the Muslim countries introduce a common currency like the euro of the European Union to facilitate trade and commerce among them.
“It would be very good if we could introduce a common currency following the European Union to facilitate trade and commerce among us,” she said.
The prime minister said this while a delegation of D-8 trade ministers led by Turkish Deputy Minister of Trade Mustafa Tizcu called on her at her official residence, Ganabhaban.
PM’s speech writer, M Nazrul Islam, briefed the reporters after the call.
Sheikh Hasina said that the D-8 was formed with the eight Muslim-majority countries of the world, aiming to enhance trade and commerce among them along with improving friendship to develop the socioeconomic status of the people of these countries.
The group comprises Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkiye.
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This paper lays out a vision for the Finternet: ...
A powerful force is stalking the world’s gold market. It is operating in the shadows.
None of the normal footprints are visible on the London bullion market or the Chicago Mercantile. Retail goldbugs have not been buyers: ETF gold funds have been shrinking since December. The crowd is piling into the Bitcoin scam instead.
Yet gold has smashed through a four-year barrier around $2,000 an ounce, rising in parabolic fashion since mid-February, and hitting an all-time high of $2,431 on April 11. Is somebody preparing for an escalation of the shadow Third World War?
“It is not a Western institution behind this. It is a massive player with very deep pockets. I have never seen this kind of buying before,” said Ross Norman, a veteran gold trader and now chief executive of Metals Daily.
Gold has been ratcheting up fresh records against the headwinds of a strong dollar, a 70 point jump in 10-year US Treasury yields, and hawkish talk from the Federal Reserve. This mix would normally spell trouble for gold.
Whoever it is – or they are – seems insensitive to cost. Central banks do not behave like this. “They buy on the London benchmark and they don’t chase the price,” said Mr Norman. This rally is happening off books in the OTC market.
Yes, China’s central bank has been adding to its declared gold reserves for 17 consecutive months, part of the gradual portfolio shift away from US Treasuries and European bonds by the Global South.
Dollar weaponisation since the war in Ukraine has unnerved every country aligned with the authoritarian axis of China and Russia. None can feel safe parking money in Western securities after Russia’s foreign reserves were frozen.
Yet the scale is modest. The World Gold Council said central banks bought a net 18 tonnes in February: 12 in China, six in Kazakhstan and India, four in Turkey, partly offset by Russian sales. This hardly moves the needle.
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But this alone cannot account for the price surge, either. Mr Norman says the gold flow to Asia has been within normal bounds.
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There is a strong suspicion among gold experts that China is behind the surge in buying, building up a war-fighting bullion chest through state-controlled banks and proxies. But others, too, can see that we are living through a fundamental convulsion of the global order, and that the dollarised financial system will not be the same at the end of it. Gold is the hedge against dystopia.
However, there is a parallel explanation. Covid finally broke our spendthrift governments. The talk in hedge fund land is that some big beasts are taking bets against “fiscal dominance” across the West.
It is a collective judgment that too many countries have pushed public debt beyond 100pc of GDP and beyond the point of no return under prevailing economic ideologies and political regimes. Budget deficits have broken out of historical ranges and are running at structurally untenable levels for this stage of the cycle.
Central banks will bottle it – under this scenario – in order to mop up issuance of treasury bonds. They will let inflation run hot to help states whittle down debts by stealth default. You might argue that this is what they already did by letting rip with extreme money creation during the pandemic.
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Of course, the gold spike may be nothing more than wolf pack speculation by funds orchestrating a squeeze on bullion shorts through the options market, knowing that this sets off a self-fueling feedback loop. If so, the rally will short-circuit soon enough.
My bet is that a big animal with a Chinese accent is bracing for geopolitical or monetary disorder on a traumatic scale.
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The BRICS bloc is considering several options in the design of an inter-member economic settlement system. In an interview with TV BRICS, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov stated that the international bloc, integrated by Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Iran, Egypt, and Ethiopia, was mulling the use of stablecoins and other digital currencies as part of this new payment network.
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Former President Donald Trump’s economic advisers are considering ways to actively stop nations from shifting away from using the dollar — an effort to counter budding moves among key emerging markets to reduce exposure to the US currency, according to people familiar with the matter.
Discussions include penalties for allies or adversaries who seek active ways to engage in bilateral trade in currencies other than the dollar — with options including export controls, currency manipulation charges and tariffs, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
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“I hate when countries go off the dollar,” Trump said in a March 11 interview on CNBC. “I would not allow countries to go off the dollar because when we lose that standard, that will be like losing a revolutionary war,” he said. “That will be a hit to our country.”
As president, Trump weighed forcibly weakening the dollar to support the domestic manufacturing sector. But now, so far he has privately said he doesn’t currently see the merits of dollar intervention, according to one person familiar with the matter. The Trump campaign referred to the former president’s latest remarks on the dollar Thursday morning.
“With Biden, you’re going to lose the dollar as the standard. That’ll be like losing the biggest war we’ve ever lost,” he said, blaming Biden’s policies for damaging views toward the dollar.
Trump has favored a stable dollar, and for other countries to match that policy by refraining from interventions seeking to devalue their currencies. With the Federal Reserve holding off on lowering interest rates, the dollar lately has been on the rise, spurring authorities overseas to consider interventions to prop up — not devalue — their currencies.
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Some commentators have spent decades predicting the imminent demise of the US dollar’s special status as the world’s international reserve currency.
Eventually, they will be right, and that day may be drawing much closer. As usual, China could hold the key.
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... Beneath the surface, though, the diversification out of US assets has continued.
As part of this trend, central banks have been adding to their holdings of gold. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has been at the forefront here, with official data showing that March was the 17th successive month of net purchases. Industry insiders suspect there has been a large amount of covert buying by the authorities too.
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... There are clear strategic advantages to China diversifying out of US assets, largely given rising geopolitical tensions over Taiwan and Beijing’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea.
As Matthew Henderson has argued in The Telegraph, the switch to gold has helped China build up a war chest safe from US sanctions. Russia has already taken this step, and other states may follow.
China’s stockpiling of gold could also be a warning that the country could use its large holdings of US government bonds as a weapon.
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The gold market is simply not large enough to absorb all of the capital that China has parked overseas.
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- What pretext will be used to bring tis about
... Australia is a step ahead in it's digital ID program. ...
Verifying your identity is something we all have to do fairly regularly, but it's about to fundamentally change as Australia passes legislation for a national digital ID.
The laws passed the Senate in late March and will go before the lower house in the upcoming parliamentary sitting period, although the ID itself (called myGovID) is already up and running.
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The BRICS group of nations could offer an alternative currency in the event of a collapse of the dollar and the international monetary system, according to Russia's executive director at the International Monetary Fund, Alexey Mozhin.
In an interview with RIA Novosti published on Friday, the expert noted that the shortcomings of the current financial system are becoming more apparent and that many publications have started to mention BRICS "in the context of the fact that this association can offer an alternative."
Mozhin explained that it is possible for the economic bloc's member countries to create a currency that would be "built on a basket of currencies of the five member countries," which would include the Chinese yuan, Indian rupee, Russian ruble, Brazilian real, and the South African rand.
"Such a proposal is being discussed. In the event of the collapse of the dollar and the international monetary system, it will be necessary to turn the said BRICS accounting unit into a real currency, backed by exchange goods," the director told the outlet.
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According to a report by the Izvestia newspaper citing Vietnam's embassy in Russia, Vietnam is actively exploring the possibility of joining the BRICS economic group. BRICS, comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, has seen recent expansion with the inclusion of four additional countries earlier this year. While Vietnam has yet to make a formal decision regarding membership, it is laying the groundwork for potential participation in BRICS activities.
The report indicates that Vietnam is in the process of establishing a framework for engagement with BRICS and considering the feasibility of submitting a membership bid. However, it remains unclear whether Vietnam will send a delegation to the upcoming BRICS summit scheduled for October in the Russian city of Kazan.
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The World Gold Council’s demand trends report for the first quarter of this year showed that Việt Nam gold demand was strong in the quarter, supporting record-high prices.
The report pointed out that Việt Nam registered the strongest bar and coin demand in the first quarter of this year since 2015, at over 14 tonnes.
Việt Nam experienced a 12 per cent year-on-year rise in demand for gold bars and coin investments, with total consumer demand increasing by 6 per cent year-on-year.
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More than unnecessary, it's sinister.I have not yet read the paper, but I assume they propose a system based upon a centralized authority for the backbone. It's unnecessary. Free market innovation in the decentralized crypto space is already developing the interconnectedness like neurons in the brain forging synapses.
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