Sunday, June 7, 2009

Russians Considering Issuing Palladium Coin

Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the Russian Parliament, the State Duma, said that the participants of the Economic Forum in St. Petersburg would discuss a possibility of making ruble coins from precious metals, reports Pravda.ru.

“We could offer the world the Russian ruble made of palladium. It would be a very strong currency. One may recollect the golden ruble, which Russia had during the tsarist times. It was a freely convertible currency and was circulating very well,” Gryzlov told reporters Thursday.

The President of the Association of Russian Banks, Garegin Tosunyan said that the coins made of precious and semi-precious metals would obviously be in demand on the market. “It has little to do with convertibility, but it would be quite normal as a measure against inflation and devaluation. Why not?” he said.

Palladium, along with platinum, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium and osmium form a group of elements referred to as the platinum group metals (PGMs). Platinum group metals share similar chemical properties, but palladium has the lowest melting point and is the least dense of these precious metals. The cost of one gram of palladium makes up about $8.

3 comments:

  1. Is this really any different from, say, the palladium Maple Leaf? I guess it's nice, but since it's unrelated to monetary policy, I don't really see the point.

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  2. what are we, in stone age? where is the cell-phone or chip based super-encrypted currency that i was looking for.

    no storage premiums
    no handling/transportation charges
    no dependency on certain resource rich countries that can do currency manipulations.
    No physical/logistical limits on "multiplier effects" in the economy. etc...


    just pure virtual electronic money. I guess they just have to eliminate the "fractional reserve" policy of it. Or reduce the f-ing leverages to less than 10 (instead of 30 in US to 60 in europe).

    Thats all it takes to reduce "precious" metals to just that - metals!

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  3. They may as well issue ruble coins maid of ice from siberia. They issue them in November, increasing monetary base. They circulate whole winter and early spring and melt in April, thereby reducin M1 and making Russian ruble even stronger!

    ReplyDelete