July 6 (Bloomberg) -- Russia and India said the world economy is too reliant on the U.S. dollar and called for changes in how $6.5 trillion in currency reserves are managed, as Group of Eight leaders prepare to meet this week.
“The dollar system or the system based on the dollar and euro have shown that they are flawed,” Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview with Corriere della Sera, repeating his proposal for a new international reserve currency.
Suresh Tendulkar, an economic adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said in a July 3 interview that he is urging his nation to diversify its foreign holdings away from the dollar.
The challenge to the dollar, a linchpin of world finance and trade since 1945, underlines the shift in relative economic power toward emerging markets and away from the developed nations that spawned the global crisis.
French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, speaking yesterday at a conference in Aix en Provence, France, said that “we must explore better coordination of exchange-rate policy.”
Questions need to be asked about “the balance of currencies and the role of currencies in a world that has changed because of the crisis and the growing role of emerging countries,” she told reporters.
Bank of France Governor Christian Noyer said at the same conference, “We really need to make sure there is a greater stability between the big currencies in the period to come.”
