July 12, 2009: The dollar bashing that began earlier this year was on the unofficial agenda for last week's G8 summit meeting in Italy. Russia's President Dmitri Medvedev emphasized his country's demand for the creation of a multi-national currency by showing journalists a newly minted coin representing a prototype the replacement currency he envisions for international trade.

"Here it is," he said in showing the coin to the group of journalists listening to his comments. "You can take a look and touch the coin." "Unity in Diversity" were the words minted on the coin, which was produced in Belgium and shown to the leaders meeting for the G8 summit. According to Medvedev, the question of a multi-national currency is now even being addressed by coinage minting facilities. The Russian president believes that the minting of a model coin shows that "they (other nations) are ready, too. I believe that the coin is a good sign of our understanding on how mutually dependent we are."

Russia wasn't the only country at the summit to express concerns about the reliability of the dollar. France and China also chimed in with their own doubts, and with president Barack Obama in the audience, Chinese treasury official Dai Bingguo did not hesitate to demand a diversification of the international monetary system.

This wasn't the first time this year that Russia and China have attacked the greenback. Prior to the G20 summit meeting last April in London, Moscow had proposed an agenda item for the summit on replacing the dollar as the main currency of world trade. In March the head of the Chinese national bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, suggested that the world's currency system needed to be reformed, with the dollar being replaced as the world's dominant currency. China is concerned about the devaluation of its substantial dollar holdings both in currency reserves and in dollar denominated U.S. treasury bills.

Although the challenge to the dollar's position as the world's main reserve currency and means of exchange for international trade is not new, it has intensified in 2009 as the effects of the worldwide economic crisis are felt and the United States has embarked on massive deficit spending to combat the crisis. In recent years Russia has threatened to price part of the oil it sells on the world market in the euro rather than the dollar, and Persian Gulf oil producing countries have had preliminary talks on establishing a common currency to use for oil sales in place of the dollar.