De-dollarisation: Are China and Brics building a gold-standard trading system?

Massive volumes of gold are being moved from Western countries, to vaults outside the Swift system and Western regulation.

Even for the world’s top gold mining countries, such as China and Kazakhstan, their central banks are buying, instead of selling, despite record high gold prices.

It is possible that countries are depositing gold into vaults located in friendly countries, as a form of “mutual hostage-taking”. In so doing, the gold on deposit can collateralise hundreds of billions of dollars in real goods trading, and thereby replace treasury bonds and dollars in that role.

Western sanctions against Russia have supercharged other governments’ urgency to build an alternative trading system, free of political coercion and foreign oversight.

(CORRECTION: I should not have said that millions of new investors are trading Shanghai gold futures, but rather that millions of new contract volumes are being traded. Apologies. The Substack transcript is correct, for users there.)

Produced by: Inside China Business