London Paul told Andrew Maguire on Live from the Vault that the shift from a unipolar world to a multipolar one has been underway since the late 1990s, and the West still does not want to hear it.
He met the engineers of multipolarity around 2012. They had already concluded that unipolarity was finished after 2008. Talking to the West was a waste of time, so they went to the Chinese and the Russians.
“They realized that talking to the West was a waste of time, so they turned to the Chinese and the Russians.”
China and Russia took it seriously. China did not need to be the dominant power, but it needed greater global influence. It joined the WTO. The rest is history. In 2012 China and Hong Kong bought a thousand metric tons of gold for thirty consecutive months, thirty thousand tons taken from the West. Gold was already being positioned as a component of the future financial structure. The West treated it as a relic.
The Maidan in Ukraine was the pivot. Shortly after, Power of Siberia 1 was signed between China and Russia, paid entirely in rubles or yuan. It went almost unnoticed. For Paul it was the moment they were free of the constraints. The Chinese and Russians realized they had to start shaping the world from a multipolar view, and trade outside the dollar was the path. The United States was already threatening sanctions, asset freezes, and bank freezes. They got the advance warning and started moving. After 2022 the freezes arrived exactly as forecast.
“Okay, now we’re free of the constraints, so to speak.”
What followed was the explosion in the Global South: local currency trade, alternative payment systems, dumping of U.S. Treasuries, and the steady replacement of the dollar with gold as a reserve asset. China has stated that gold will be an important element in the future financial architecture. Hong Kong, mainland China, and gold are the structure they are expanding. They are not claiming exclusivity. Dubai, Singapore, Russia, and eventually Africa can have centers too. They are simply saying there is an alternative.
Gold, in this telling, is the only neutral reserve asset left that can bridge the competing systems. Sovereign wealth funds are quietly repositioning into physical. The petrodollar’s decline is structural, not cyclical. Energy trade is the accelerator. Silver sits in the new monetary architecture as the industrial and monetary metal that has not yet been fully repriced. Western retail is the last to understand what is happening because it still assumes a Bretton Woods 2.0 in which America remains dominant. That, Paul said, is absolute nonsense.
“Somehow we will reinvent the Bretton Woods Agreement and get Bretton Woods 2.0, but we will still be the dominant power, which is of course absolute nonsense.”
The next twelve months, in their map, are the acceleration. The dollar system is the one being left behind. Gold is the bridge. Silver is the metal that still has the most room once the architecture is recognized. The West is last to see it because it is still looking at the old order.
