Russia recently announced the possibility of the gold market’s new bullish momentum with the introduction of a new trading currency backed by gold. This compounds the de-dollarization trend unfolding in the global economy, which included the prevalent historic pace of purchasing precious metals by central banks worldwide since the middle of 2022 to diversify their reserve away from the U.S. dollar.
According to state-run international news portal RT, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration confirmed that Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) are set to announce at the BRICS summit in August in South Africa the launch of a new gold-backed trading currency.
“With the growing initiative, more and more countries are lining up to join the group,” the news outlet wrote.
BRICS plans to introduce new gold-backed currency
Follow us on Rumble: https://t.co/Nuc9nUzTc5 pic.twitter.com/WnkHCN0j7Y
— RT (@RT_com) July 6, 2023
Meanwhile, former journalist Willem MiddelKoop tweeted that 41 countries have applied for BRICS
There You Go – It’s Official
‘BRICS planning to introduce new trading currency backed by gold at August summit’
‘Gold standard will be a great benefit to strengthening single currency’
‘41 countries have applied for BRICS-membership’
Source: RT / Russian Embassy pic.twitter.com/zmqOKiXlsa
— Willem Middelkoop (@wmiddelkoop) July 7, 2023
The developing trend of steering away from the American dollar has received various opinions on how it would devastate the dominance of the United States currency. Some suspect China’s recent gold purchases are an attempt to bring international credibility to the yuan. President Joe Biden’s regime weaponizes its USD against Russia as a form of sanction for invading Ukraine. Of course, this has created some geopolitical uncertainty among some nations allied with Russia.
To others, it is unlikely to replace the dollar and the new gold-backed currency would exist only as an addition to the established dollar-based global monetary system. An official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum report said, “It will be a regional initiative rather like the euro.”
Though a good measure, expert Thorsten Polleit believes steering clear of the USD is still far-fetched. The Degussa chief economist said that while the announcement is a step in the right direction, there is still a long way to go to become a reality. “At first glance, a new transaction unit, backed by gold, sounds like good money and it could be, first and foremost, a major challenge to the U.S. dollar’s hegemony,” he said in an exclusive comment to Kitco News.
But the devil is in the details, Polleit warned. According to him, to make the new currency as good as gold, a truly sound currency, it must be convertible into gold on demand. He said he was not sure whether this is what BRICS has in mind.
“Using gold as money, the unit of account would be a true game changer, no doubt about it. It could lead to a sharp devaluation of many fiat currencies vis-à-vis the yellow metal (including the BRICS fiat currencies), and it could catapult up goods prices in terms of fiat currencies. It could be a shock to the global fiat money system. I am not sure that this is what the BRICS wish to achieve,” he said.
Another option would be for the BRICS nation to create a new bank for financing foreign trade that would require holding gold as capital, Polleit volunteered. “Against this gold stock, the new bank could say, grant financing loans to exporters, and issue the “new currency;” or BRICS exports will be sold against the “new currency” and/or gold,” he said. “I think it is fair to say that it is early to come up with a final conclusion where this will lead us to – we need more details.”
Chief Investment Officer at Zaye Capital Markets Naeem Aslam mirrors the same sentiment. According to Aslam, the precious metal continues to face short-term challenges and despite the announcement, the world is still far from seeing a gold-backed currency.
“But this doesn’t mean this can’t be achieved at all,” he said. “For now, any additional positive news on this could certainly help the gold price, but more importantly, traders are now going to be focused on the U.S. CPI data, which is due next week.”
SCO to shift to domestic currencies for financial transactions
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member states like the BRICS nations are planning on ditching the dollar eventually, according to the Eurasian political, economic, international security and defense organization’s latest virtual 23rd SCO summit on July 4, where a landslide decision to conduct the majority of transactions in national currencies instead of the American dollar, following Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s proposal, was agreed on.
Raisi warned against the world’s dependency on USD in global exchanges and pointed out the importance of de-dollarization to form a just international system. “Based on the experience of the past decades, it is now obvious that militarism and the dominance of the dollar form the bases of the Western domination system,” the president stressed. “Therefore, any attempt to shape a fair international system requires the removal of this instrument of dominance in intra-regional relations.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who chaired the meeting, Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif were all in attendance at the summit.
Read more about how the U.S. dollar is slowly weakening at DollarDemise.com.
Sources for this article include:
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
would exist only as an addition to the established dollar.” Oh really? Well if you consider BRICS will control all the worlds energy and minerals, I guess you could be right.