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Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina suggested on Tuesday that the Muslim countries introduce a common currency like the euro of the European Union to facilitate trade and commerce among them.
“It would be very good if we could introduce a common currency following the European Union to facilitate trade and commerce among us,” she said.
The prime minister said this while a delegation of D-8 trade ministers led by Turkish Deputy Minister of Trade Mustafa Tizcu called on her at her official residence, Ganabhaban.
PM’s speech writer, M Nazrul Islam, briefed the reporters after the call.
Sheikh Hasina said that the D-8 was formed with the eight Muslim-majority countries of the world, aiming to enhance trade and commerce among them along with improving friendship to develop the socioeconomic status of the people of these countries.
The group comprises Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkiye.
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This paper lays out a vision for the Finternet: ...
A powerful force is stalking the world’s gold market. It is operating in the shadows.
None of the normal footprints are visible on the London bullion market or the Chicago Mercantile. Retail goldbugs have not been buyers: ETF gold funds have been shrinking since December. The crowd is piling into the Bitcoin scam instead.
Yet gold has smashed through a four-year barrier around $2,000 an ounce, rising in parabolic fashion since mid-February, and hitting an all-time high of $2,431 on April 11. Is somebody preparing for an escalation of the shadow Third World War?
“It is not a Western institution behind this. It is a massive player with very deep pockets. I have never seen this kind of buying before,” said Ross Norman, a veteran gold trader and now chief executive of Metals Daily.
Gold has been ratcheting up fresh records against the headwinds of a strong dollar, a 70 point jump in 10-year US Treasury yields, and hawkish talk from the Federal Reserve. This mix would normally spell trouble for gold.
Whoever it is – or they are – seems insensitive to cost. Central banks do not behave like this. “They buy on the London benchmark and they don’t chase the price,” said Mr Norman. This rally is happening off books in the OTC market.
Yes, China’s central bank has been adding to its declared gold reserves for 17 consecutive months, part of the gradual portfolio shift away from US Treasuries and European bonds by the Global South.
Dollar weaponisation since the war in Ukraine has unnerved every country aligned with the authoritarian axis of China and Russia. None can feel safe parking money in Western securities after Russia’s foreign reserves were frozen.
Yet the scale is modest. The World Gold Council said central banks bought a net 18 tonnes in February: 12 in China, six in Kazakhstan and India, four in Turkey, partly offset by Russian sales. This hardly moves the needle.
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But this alone cannot account for the price surge, either. Mr Norman says the gold flow to Asia has been within normal bounds.
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There is a strong suspicion among gold experts that China is behind the surge in buying, building up a war-fighting bullion chest through state-controlled banks and proxies. But others, too, can see that we are living through a fundamental convulsion of the global order, and that the dollarised financial system will not be the same at the end of it. Gold is the hedge against dystopia.
However, there is a parallel explanation. Covid finally broke our spendthrift governments. The talk in hedge fund land is that some big beasts are taking bets against “fiscal dominance” across the West.
It is a collective judgment that too many countries have pushed public debt beyond 100pc of GDP and beyond the point of no return under prevailing economic ideologies and political regimes. Budget deficits have broken out of historical ranges and are running at structurally untenable levels for this stage of the cycle.
Central banks will bottle it – under this scenario – in order to mop up issuance of treasury bonds. They will let inflation run hot to help states whittle down debts by stealth default. You might argue that this is what they already did by letting rip with extreme money creation during the pandemic.
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Of course, the gold spike may be nothing more than wolf pack speculation by funds orchestrating a squeeze on bullion shorts through the options market, knowing that this sets off a self-fueling feedback loop. If so, the rally will short-circuit soon enough.
My bet is that a big animal with a Chinese accent is bracing for geopolitical or monetary disorder on a traumatic scale.
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The BRICS bloc is considering several options in the design of an inter-member economic settlement system. In an interview with TV BRICS, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov stated that the international bloc, integrated by Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Iran, Egypt, and Ethiopia, was mulling the use of stablecoins and other digital currencies as part of this new payment network.
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