TODAY’S CURRENCY AND FINANCIAL WARS 127perts, and people from the Fed, people from the United States
Treasury, think tanks, universities actually ridicule us saying,
“This is ridiculous. Don’t you know gold has no place in the
monetary system? It’s obsolete. Why are you doing this? This
just seems like a waste of time.”
Be that as it may, we played it out.
I won’t take you through every move, it’s all described in
my first book Currency Wars. Since 2009, Russia has increased
its gold reserves by 70%. China has increased its gold reserves
several hundreds of percent. No one knows the exact number
because they’re not transparent about it.
As of 2009, they now stay at 1,054 tons. Whether today they
have 3,000 tons or 4,000 tons, no one knows exactly. But that’s
the right order of magnitude and they seem to be determined
about acquiring more.
Their actions were actually playing out as we modeled it
for the Defense Department in 2009. China is a very robust
actor in financial warfare.
In the United States, we’ve been in a financial war with
Iran since 2011. The United States did a couple of things. This
was, of course, because of Iran’s uranium enrichment efforts
and a drive to get nuclear weapons.
The U.S. first kicked Iran out of the dollar payment sys-
tem, that’s called Fedwire. It’s a clearance system run by the
Federal Reserve. We said, “You’re out and your banks are out.
Any Swiss or other foreign banks that do business with Iran,
you’re out too.”
That’s the way the U.S. forces other banks to follow their
policy — by telling them they can’t do business in the U.S.
unless they comply.
Iran said, “Fine, we’ll just ship our oil and price it in Euros.
We don’t need your dollars and we don’t need your dollar pay-
ment system.”
There’s another, even larger, payment system in Europe