Somalilandsun – Russia has been escalating a war on the US Dollar in response to the sanctions that the US and the EU have imposed on it over the crisis in Ukraine.
According to an article by Jerome Robert Corsi, who is an American author and political commentator, Russia has, over the last year, sold off one-third of its US Treasury holdings.
Corsi says Moscow had the US Treasury holdings of $153 billion in March 2013. But the figure reduced to $100.4 billion by March 2014. In March alone, he says, Russia sold about $26 billion of its US Treasuries.
The sell-off is widely seen as Kremlin’s reaction to the economic sanctions that the US slapped on Russia as punishment for its policies in Ukraine.
Corsi has described the move as “The war on the petrodollar”.
Corsi is not the only analyst who has been reporting on the Russian reactions to the US-EU sanctions.
Washington DC-based independent writer and analyst, Umberto Pascali, says “Sanctions against Russia could be the final trigger that will force many countries to create a new independent financial system based on the real economy.”
Pascali has said that In response to the US sanctions, “on March 4th the economic adviser to Putin, Sergey Glazyev declared openly that if the financial vultures persisted, Russia would create on the spot an independent financial system which is separate from that of the US Dollar.”
According to Pascali, Glazyev said “We have wonderful economic and trade relations with our Southern and Eastern partners. We will find a way not just to eliminate our dependence on the US but also profit from these sanctions….If sanctions are applied against Russia’s state structures we will have to move into other currencies and create our own settlement system. We will be forced to recognize the impossibility of repayment of the loans that the US banks gave to Russian state structures. Indeed, sanctions are a double-edged weapon, and if the US chooses to freeze our assets, then our equities and liabilities in dollars will also be frozen.”
American economist, Paul Craig Roberts, who served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, has said that the US sanctions against Russia will only encourage Moscow to withdraw from “Washington’s exploitative system.”
“The [US] sanctions are nothing but gratuitous propaganda. The main effect will be to encourage the Russian government to withdraw from the dollar-based payments system that makes sanctions possible,” Paul Craig Roberts told Press TV.
“Once important countries cease to use the US dollar as reserve currency and the means of settling international payments, Washington’s imperial power will decline,” Roberts said.
http://www.presstv.ir
