The Financial Times reports: “Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, said Moscow was bidding to help lead efforts to build a new world economic order after the old system collapsed in the global financial crisis.

Opening Russia’s annual economic forum in St Petersburg where hundreds of global chief executives have flocked, Mr. Medvedev said the renewed interest in Russia this year was a sign of a changing world in which the institutions of the western-dominated world order had had their day amid thousands of corporate defaults and the threat of sovereign defaults.

‘What had seemed untouchable has collapsed. The bubbles that created the illusion of flourishing economies have burst,’ Mr. Medvedev said. ‘For Russia this situation is a challenge and an opportunity. We are living in a unique time. And we should use it to build a modern, flourishing and strong Russia … which will be a co-founder of the new world economic order and a full participant in the collective political leadership of the post-crisis world.’

Mr. Medvedev insisted ‘Russia has changed’ in the past year as it sought to pursue a course of ‘smart politics’ that would leverage its competitive advantages in the raw materials sector, while shifting emphasis towards modernizing the economy and focusing on boosting innovation over resources.

Acknowledging that the country still had a great deal to do to meet these aims, Mr. Medvedev laid out a series of new initiatives that aim to boost its attractiveness as an investment destination. ‘Russia needs a real investment boom’, in order to achieve its modernization goals, he said. To stimulate that, Mr. Medvedev announced Moscow would introduce zero taxation on capital gains for companies working on long-term investments starting from January next year and said Russia was improving the legal system to provide better protection for businesses against the long arm of bureaucracy…” (It is being set up now and will be in full force soon. Order my DVD “Dictator of the New World Order: Alive and Waiting in the Wings“for a full study – Daniel 8:23; Daniel 7:23; Revelation 13:1, 7.)

Bloomberg.com reports: “Russia wants the ruble to be one of the world’s reserve currencies as President Dmitry Medvedev renews his push to reduce the dollar’s dominance and make Moscow a global financial hub.

‘Only three, five years ago it seemed like a fantasy’ to create a new reserve currency, Medvedev said in a speech in St. Petersburg, Russia. ‘Now we are seriously discussing it.’

Medvedev, who has repeatedly called for a supranational currency to match the dollar, said discussions with China are continuing on broadening the global options. Russia sold U.S. Treasuries for a fifth consecutive month in April, the U.S. Treasury Department said June 15. The world may need as many as six reserve currencies, Medvedev said.

‘It’s something that’s obviously needed,’ he said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. ‘Developing a financial center in Moscow will considerably help to strengthen the ruble’s position as one of the reserve currencies.’

Medvedev’s comments underline Russia’s ambition to reassert its global power following the financial crisis. Gross domestic product shrank 7.9 percent last year, the worst contraction since the fall of communism in 1991, after the credit crunch sent commodity prices plunging.

If a country wants to alter the world economic order, including the number of reserve currencies, it must become an international financial center, Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer said in an interview…” (Shades of the beginning of Revelation 13: 16 -18.)

Reuters reports: “A new United Nations report released calls for abandoning the U.S. dollar as the main global reserve currency, saying it has been unable to safeguard value.

But several European officials attending a high-level meeting of the U.N. Economic and Social Council countered by saying that the market, not politicians, would determine what currencies countries would keep on hand for reserves.

‘The dollar has proved not to be a stable store of value, which is a requisite for a stable reserve currency,’ the U.N. World Economic and Social Survey 2010 said.

The report says that developing countries have been hit by the U.S. dollar’s loss of value in recent years.

‘Motivated in part by needs for self-insurance against volatility in commodity markets and capital flows, many developing countries accumulated vast amounts of such (U.S. dollar) reserves during the 2000s,’ it said.

The report supports replacing the dollar with the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights (SDRs), an international reserve asset that is used as a unit of payment on IMF loans and is made up of a basket of currencies.

‘A new global reserve system could be created, one that no longer relies on the United States dollar as the single major reserve currency,’ the U.N. report said.

The report said a new reserve system ‘must not be based on a single currency or even multiple national currencies but instead, should permit the emission of international liquidity — such as SDRs — to create a more stable global financial system.’

‘Such emissions of international liquidity could also underpin the financing of investment in long-term sustainable development,’ it said…” (See the preceding article.)