France, as current head of the Group of 20 countries, will help the transition to a global financial system based on ’several international currencies’, French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde said today.

Lagarde, speaking ahead of a G20 finance ministers meeting in Paris on Friday and Saturday, said the world had to move on from the ‘non-monetary system’ it now has to one ‘based on several international currencies’.

Accordingly, France wants to see less need for countries, especially the emerging economies, to accumulate huge foreign reserves, she said.

At the same time, international capital flows should be better regulated and the role of the Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund should be reinforced by the inclusion of China’s yuan in the system.

China, whose booming economy now ranks second only to the US in size after overtaking Japan, has accumulated massive forex reserves of more than $2.5 trillion on the back of its sustained trade surpluses and foreign fund inflows.

Washington says the build-up reflects an unfair undervaluation of the yuan, a charge Beijing rejects.

France has previously said it wanted to see the global financial system reduce its reliance on the dollar for a more broad-based arrangement.

There’s no mistaking what’s in this vending machine. The well-heeled in the Gulf can now grab “gold to go” from a hotel lobby in the United Arab Emirates, when the need for a quick ingot strikes.

On Thursday, a day after its inauguration, the shiny machine attracted spectators of many different nationalities who gathered to watch whenever an enthusiast was struck with the urge to splurge on a bar of the precious metal.

Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace Hotel became the first place outside Germany to install “gold to go, the world’s first gold vending machine,” said a statement from Ex Oriente Lux AG, the German company behind the vending machine.

“In addition to one-gram, five-gram and 10-gram bars of gold, the machine also dispenses gold coins,” it added…

[continues at AFP/Yahoo News]

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, suggested Friday the organization might one day be called on to provide countries with a global reserve currency that would serve as an alternative to the U.S. dollar.

“That day has not yet come, but I think it is intellectually healthy to explore these kinds of ideas now,” he said in a speech on the future mandate of the 186-nation Washington-based lending organization.

Strauss-Kahn said such an asset could be similar to but distinctly different from the IMF’s special drawing rights, or SDRs, the accounting unit that countries use to hold funds within the IMF. It is based on a basket of major currencies.

He said having other alternatives to the dollar “would limit the extent to which the international monetary system as a whole depends on the policies and conditions of a single, albeit dominant, country.”

Strauss-Kahn, a former finance minister of France, said that during the recent global financial crisis, the dollar “played its role as a safe haven” asset, and the current international monetary system demonstrated resilience…

[continues at ABC News/AP]

The announcement by the United Nations this week that it will license the minting of silver and gold bullion coins bearing the UN logo may be the button that launches metal prices into orbit.

In its wide-ranging report this fall, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) stated that the system of currencies and international banking practices within today’s economies were inadequate, and responsible for the present economic crisis. The report advocates that the present monetary system, wherein the dollar acts as the global reserve currency be re-examined “with urgency”.

The UNCTAD Report was the first time a major multinational institution had forwarded such a suggestion or measure, although a number of countries, including Russia and Brazil have supported replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. China’s central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan has mentioned that the dollar could become a basket of currencies instead.

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The dollar will get “utterly destroyed” and become “virtually worthless”, said Damon Vickers, chief investment officer of Nine Points Capital Partners.

“We don’t have resources. Neither does a lot of Asia to be quite frank,” Vickers said on CNBC’s Asia Squawk Box. “Countries that have resources — the Brazils, the Canadas, Australia — their currencies are doing well.” Vickers noted that their stock markets have done the best year-to-date.

“They have stuff. They’ve got resources. They export real things. The United States exports ‘promises’ and ‘pretty paper’,” he added.

Due to the huge wage disparities between the United States and emerging markets like China, Vickers said that may resolve itself in some type of a global currency crisis.

“If the global currency crisis unfolds, then inevitably you get an alignment of a global world government. A new global currency and a new world order, so we may be moving towards that,” he said.

Vickers added that this is the time where investors should be making money when the trend is developing. “Oil looks higher, gold looks higher, currencies look weaker.”