{"id":14453,"date":"2015-11-16T06:55:12","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T11:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14453"},"modified":"2015-11-16T06:55:12","modified_gmt":"2015-11-16T11:55:12","slug":"grandmaster-putins-trap-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14453","title":{"rendered":"Grandmaster Putin\u2019s Trap \u2013 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grandmaster Putin\u2019s Trap \u2013 2<\/a><\/h3>\n
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\"Grandmaster<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In December of last year we published an intriguing article by Dmitry Kalinichenko, \u201cGrandmaster Putin\u2019s Trap<\/a>,\u201d which has drawn far more attention from readers than we ever expected. It continues to be\u00a0cited<\/a>\u00a0by many international political and economic experts. That article addressed Russia\u2019s latent strategy to get rid of US bonds and use its petrodollars to buy monetary gold. It seemed for a while that the ruble\u2019s nosedive late last year, coupled with the Kremlin\u2019s reduced fiscal space, has left Moscow unable to pursue its plan to permanently diversify the international financial system. Nevertheless, taking a look at 2015, it turned out that Putin\u2019s strategy is working quite well.<\/p>\n

Due to\u00a0invisible market\u2019s hand<\/em>\u00a0the\u00a0gold-to-oil price ratio<\/a>\u00a0has more than doubled in the past two years. While in\u00a0May 2014<\/strong>\u00a0it costed\u00a012 barrels of oil to buy one ounce of gold<\/strong>, this ratio rose to\u00a026<\/strong>barrels\/ounce in<\/strong>\u00a0January 2015<\/strong>\u00a0(where it currently remains). By lowering the price of oil relative to gold, it looks like Wall Street & London\u2019s City are trying to hamper Russian tactic of buying gold in exchange for oil and natural gas (gas prices are linked to oil via\u00a0BTU<\/a>). However, these actions fell short of their goals. Declining oil prices and a depreciating national currency have not led to a slowdown in the Bank of Russia\u2019s gold purchases on the domestic market for rubles. Despite threats and sanctions, Russia has continued to add to its gold reserves<\/a>. Bank of Russia\u00a0bought a record<\/strong>\u00a0171 tons of gold in 2014 and another 120 tons in the first ten months of 2015<\/strong>. Consequently, by\u00a0Nov. 1, 2015<\/strong>\u00a0the Bank of Russia had accumulated\u00a0<\/strong>a total of 1,200 tons of gold<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0in its reserves<\/strong>, which are officially the fifth largest in the world, although in reality Russia is actually in 4th place, as Germany is allowed to store only\u00a0one-third of its reserves<\/a>\u00a0at home.<\/p>\n

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Grandmaster Putin\u2019s Trap \u2013 2 In December of last year we published an intriguing article by Dmitry Kalinichenko, \u201cGrandmaster Putin\u2019s Trap,\u201d which has drawn far more attention from readers than we ever expected. It continues to be\u00a0cited\u00a0by many international political and economic experts. That article addressed Russia\u2019s latent strategy to get rid of US bonds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1067,130,374,10624,588,660,694],"class_list":["post-14453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-bank-of-russia","tag-china","tag-gold","tag-gold-to-oil-ratio","tag-oil","tag-putin","tag-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14453"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14454,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14453\/revisions\/14454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}