TI News Alert: De-Dollarization is Starting To Happen

It’s no secret that the U.S. Government has been living WAAAY beyond its means for far too long now. Currently as it stands, the U.S. is 17.5 trillion dollars in debt and with a GDP of 16.7 trillion and tax revenues at 3.5 trillion, we won’t be catching up with the current rate of spending anytime soon.

Add to that the constant Quantitative Easing (ie “printing” of money) to pay off our debts, and what you have is the continual devaluation of the dollar.

So why aren’t we seeing huge inflation and a world-wide running away from the dollar as we have seen in Argentina or Zimbabwe? Well, one of the BIG reasons is that the dollar has been the world-reserve currency for some time now, but it looks like that is changing…

What’s Happening

Not surprisingly, none of the mainstream media is covering this but what should be front and center for every “aware” American is that Russia is actually making a move against the petrodollar.

Again, this isn’t entirely new news. Since earlier this year in April, Russia has been talking about a “de-dollarization strategy” on the petrodollar (the U.S. dollar) as reported in The Voice of Russia:

Russian press reports that the country’s Ministry of Finance is ready to greenlight a plan to radically increase the role of the Russian ruble in export operations while reducing the share of dollar-denominated transactions. Governmental sources believe that the Russian banking sector is “ready to handle the increased number of ruble-denominated transactions”.

According to the Prime news agency, on April 24th the government organized a special meeting dedicated to finding a solution for getting rid of the US dollar in Russian export operations. Top level experts from the energy sector, banks and governmental agencies were summoned and a number of measures were proposed as a response for American sanctions against Russia.

The “de-dollarization meeting” was chaired by First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Igor Shuvalov, proving that Moscow is very serious in its intention to stop using the dollar.

This would be a HUGE economic blow to us here and would essentially end the dollar’s monopoly as the petrodollar.

So were they all talk back in April? Just mad at us for the economic sanctions we slapped on them earlier?

Nope.

It looks like it’s really happening…

Russia is Abandoning the Dollar

Gazprom (who is our planet’s largest natural gas producer) has just finished signing agreements with some of their largest customers to switch payments for natural gas from U.S. dollars to euros.

So how does this relate to Russia? Well, the Russian government holds a majority stake in Gazprom, so this deal did not happen by chance, but happened with the full approval of the Russian government.

The following excerpt comes from a news report by the ITAR-TASS news agency…

Gazprom Neft had signed additional agreements with consumers on a possible switch from dollars to euros for payments under contracts, the oil company’s head Alexander Dyukov told a press conference.

“Additional agreements of Gazprom Neft on the possibility to switch contracts from dollars to euros are signed. With Belarus, payments in roubles are agreed on,” he said.

Dyukov said nine of ten consumers had agreed to switch to euros.

Gazprom isn’t the only large Russian corporation moving away from the dollar. Here’s another report by RT (Russia Today):

Russia will start settling more contracts in Asian currencies, especially the yuan, in order to lessen its dependence on the dollar market, and because of Western-led sanctions that could freeze funds at any moment.

“Over the last few weeks there has been a significant interest in the market from large Russian corporations to start using various products in renminbi and other Asian currencies, and to set up accounts in Asian locations,” Pavel Teplukhin, head of Deutsche Bank in Russia, told the Financial Times, which was published in an article on Sunday.

Diversifying trade accounts from dollars to the Chinese yuan and other Asian currencies such as the Hong Kong dollar and Singapore dollar has been a part of Russia’s pivot towards Asian as tension with Europe and the US remain strained over Russia’s action in Ukraine.

And to further pound the proverbial nail in the coffin, Russians have been pulling their money out of U.S. banks at an unprecedented rate:

So in March, without waiting for the sanction spiral to kick in, Russians yanked their moolah out of US banks. Deposits by Russians in US banks suddenly plunged from $21.6 billion to $8.4 billion. They yanked out 61% of their deposits in just one month! They’d learned their lesson in Cyprus the hard way: get your money out while you still can before it gets confiscated.

What This Means to You

Again, because the U.S. dollar is the world reserve currency, we gain a massive advantage in that the value of the dollar is kept artificially high and at the same time our borrowing costs artificially low.

Sure, if Russia pulls out of the dollar it will hurt us, but the REAL BLOW will come when other countries follow suit — leading to a financial avalanche.

This is just the turning point of the collapse of the dollar and our way of life as we’ve come to know it.

What You Should Do About It

I’ve always been a big proponent of holding a good portion of your assets in gold (and to a lesser extent, silver)…of course, AFTER you’ve stocked up on food, water and energy storage.

So if you haven’t yet, its time to start getting prepared. This collapse won’t happen immediately, but at the rate things are moving, I don’t think we have much more time.

If you’ve been struggling with getting prepared, and need a solid, step-by-step approach on how to do it, be sure to check out my “hold you by the hand, step-by-step” prepping program called Prepper Academy. Check it out here.