Medvedev Resurrects Idea of Replacing Dollar as Reserve Currency

Barely 24 hours after announcing that Russia and the United States would cooperate on a variety of long-simmering issues, President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia reproposed a Russian idea that the United States had thought it had batted away: starting a new basket of strong regional currencies to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

In a speech before leaders here at the Group of 20 summit meeting, Mr. Medvedev said that the countries most responsible for the global economic crisis (read: the United States) are not taking their fair share of the burden for “macroeconomic policies” needed to fix the problem.

“On this basis we conclude that it would be wise to support the creation of strong regional currencies and to use them as the basis for a new reserve currency,” Mr. Medvedev said. “One could also consider partially backing this currency with gold.”