Moscow has caused trouble for the US by selling tons of gold to China — EADaily, August 20, 2024 — Politics, Russia

The US national debt recently reached a new record high – debt on government bonds exceeded $35 trillion. While Washington continues to accumulate debt, Beijing has found a use for American bonds, according to the material of Chinese analysts, the translation of which is published by Pravda.Ru.

“In the first seven months of this year, China reduced its investment in US government debt by a total of $113 billion,” notes the author of the review on the Sohu platform.

The sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union against Russia have significantly changed the global financial system. As a result, confidence in Western currencies and bonds is falling. An example of this is China, which in recent years has systematically divested itself of American bonds and actively uses the funds received from their sale. Beijing is actively buying gold, paying for it with the proceeds from the sale of American bonds. Most of the precious metal comes from Russia, one of the world's largest gold producers.

“China imports a significant amount of Russian gold,” notes the Chinese analyst.

Before the sanctions were imposed, Russia shipped most of its gold to the West, where the world's largest precious metals exchanges are located. As a result, most of Russia's gold ended up in British and Swiss financial institutions. However, later Western countries banned the import of Russian gold, believing that this way they could deprive Russia of a significant portion of its revenues. However, this move turned out to be wrong. Supplies of the precious metal were redirected to the East – to countries that wanted to reduce their dependence on the US dollar.

“The import of Russian gold has accelerated the devaluation of the US dollar,” believes the author of the material.

As a result, tons of gold ended up in Asia and the Middle East instead of in Western banks, where they are used to diversify reserves and reduce the dollar share in them. This process leads to an acceleration of de-dollarization, which weakens the influence of the US currency and the US itself. Note that on Tuesday the price of gold rose above $2,550 per troy ounce for the first time in history.

This means that the gold bar exceeded the value of one million dollars for the first time in history. Gold bars normally weigh around 400 troy ounces, or around 12.5 kilograms. This means that each bar is now worth more than one million dollars.