My suspicion is that in the near future Russia and China will come together to create a gold-backed currency. Not a merging of the two countries, mind you, simply a partnership between the two of them, and any other countries willing to pony up the gold, to create a currency which is backed by actual gold reserves as opposed to today's fiat currencies. Then they can require that oil, for example, be paid only in that gold-backed currency. When they do that, it will collapse the dollar and all the other quantitive easing-loving bits of paper out there.