With the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in 2022, Russia, China and their trading partners began establishing alternative monetary and financial arrangements.  A leading intellectual on these matters at Moscow, Sergei Glazyev, recently proposed a “Gold Ruble 3.0,” following the gold rubles of both the Czarist and Soviet eras.

This new system would be primarily digital, but that is actually not much different than the way things were done in the late 19th century. That was underscored in 2009 by the head of Communist China’s central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan.