text: In Australia's New Left Review, Gavan McCormack claimed that USTR Zoellick had intervened during a 2004 privatization issue in Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's re-election campaign: "The office of the U.S. Trade Representative has played an active part in drafting the Japan Post privatization law. An October 2004 letter from Robert Zoellick to Japan's Finance Minister Takenaka Heizo, tabled in the Diet on August 2, 2005, included a handwritten note from Zoellick commending Takenaka. Challenged to explain this apparent U.S. government intervention in a domestic matter, Koizumi merely expressed his satisfaction that Takenaka had been befriended by such an important figure… It is hard to overestimate the scale of the opportunity offered to U.S. and global finance capital by the privatization of the Postal Savings System."
  In the lead-up to the 2010 G-20 Seoul summit and in the immediate wake of the U.S. elections and subsequent Fed QE2 monetary-policy move, Zoellick published a suggestion  for increased awareness of the function of gold in international currency markets.  This was misinterpreted by many economists as a call for the return of some form of gold standard in a post-Bretton Woods II world. Zoellick's response was to point out the misinterpretation: he did not advocate a return to the gold standard, but a new role for gold in currency markets as an alternative monetary asset, which he termed "reference point gold".
  In March 2016, Zoellick signed an "open letter" in which GOP national security leaders outlined their reasons not to support a ticket headed by Donald Trump. In August, Zoellick signed a letter from fifty GOP national security officials calling Trump a national security risk.