Vladimir is now learning quickly

It took him a few years, but Vladimir Putin seems to have finally figured out how the world economy really works and he clearly doesn't like what he has learned.

The Russian President also looks determined to change things up at least a little bit, a task that is much easier to accomplish when you're sitting on a huge chunk of the world's natural resources - energy and other raw materials that much of the rest of the world wants badly and for which they are willing to pay high prices.

It seems that one of the big problems is that Russia's customers pay in U.S. dollars, which, here in 2007, nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, must be a bit irritating.

Recent comments by U.S. President George W. Bush urging the Russian President to loosen up a little bit because "the Cold War is over" must have been even more irritating.

News came over the weekend that Putin wants a "new balance of power" in the world economy and when someone says something like that you know what they really want - more power for themselves.

The International Herald Tribune reports that while the fate of a $17 billion oil and natural gas field of energy giant BP hangs in the balance, the Russian President seeks to assure the Western world that he remains committed to free trade.

Free trade, apparently, on his terms.

Speaking at a business forum here Sunday, Putin called for a new world economic framework based on regional alliances rather than global institutions like the International Monetary Fund.

The new system, he said, would reflect the rising power of emerging market economies like Russia, China, India and Brazil, and the decline of the old heavyweights of the United States, Japan and many European countries.

The developed countries, Putin said, were dominating the institutions of world trade in an "inflexible" manner, even as their own share of the global wealth is diminishing. He said the world needed a "new architecture of international economic relations based on trust and mutually beneficial integration."

Putin said 60 percent of the world's Gross Domestic Product was now produced outside of the Group of 7 countries - the United States, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan and Canada.

That sounds a lot like the "Old Europe" talk we all heard a few years back from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld just before embarking on the Iraq adventure.

In this case, the swipe will not likely prove to be misguided.

Wasting little time in demonstrating just how much he has learned about how things really work, Putin got right to the heart of the matter - the money. More specifically, the Russian President now questions why everyone has to use U.S. Dollars for international payments and play by the rules of the IMF and WTO.

Not coincidentally, over the past few years the Russian central bank has been furiously building up its gold reserves, buying more than half of Russian mine production in the process.

Change is afoot.

In a remarkable demonstration of just how much Vladimir has learned recently, have a look at what the heads of the world's biggest energy companies had to say after spending some time with him over the weekend.

Motorola, ConocoPhilips, Siemens, Schlumberger, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Deutsche Bank and Ernst & Young were among the companies that dispatched their senior executive to the meeting.

At the meeting, Jeroen van der Veer, the chief of Royal Dutch Shell, asked Putin to clarify the rules of investment for energy companies in Russia, Reuters reported. Last autumn, Shell lost control of its Sakhalin-2 development in a forced sale to Gazprom, the natural gas monopoly. Putin responded by reciting the history of the Sakhalin project and thanked van der Veer for his role in resolving the dispute.

After the opportunity to rub elbows with the Russian president, several chief executives praised Putin's economic polices and razor sharp attention to the details of their companies' work in Russia.

Putin showed "a remarkable grasp of industrial policy," Andrew Gould, chairman and chief executive of Schlumberger, the oil field services company, said after the meeting.

Michael White, the vice president of PepsiCo, said Putin struck him as "very articulate and remarkably on top of every deal."

Uh-oh.