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Osborne costs UK £45 billion by NOT selling the gold!
blueisthecolour
Posts: 20,127 Forum Member
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In September 2011 the price of gold was $1900 an ounce.
Today the figure is only $1200.
The UK holds over 310 tonnes of gold - approximately 10 million ounces.
So the total value of our gold stock has FALLEN by $700 x 10 milllion - $70 billion - £45 billion since September 2011.
Osborne is clearly liable for not being able to predict international gold prices - obviously they would fall from such a peak - and as such has cost this country £45 billion.
Disgraceful >:(
Today the figure is only $1200.
The UK holds over 310 tonnes of gold - approximately 10 million ounces.
So the total value of our gold stock has FALLEN by $700 x 10 milllion - $70 billion - £45 billion since September 2011.
Osborne is clearly liable for not being able to predict international gold prices - obviously they would fall from such a peak - and as such has cost this country £45 billion.
Disgraceful >:(
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Comments
Perhaps having and holding would have been the better option.
Actually no
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/thomaspascoe/100018367/revealed-why-gordon-brown-sold-britains-gold-at-a-knock-down-price/
What's disgraceful is your arithmetic.
$700 x 10 million is $7 bn or £ 4.5 bn
Personally if we were back on the gold standard we would be better off and housing would be more affordable. Bankers would hate it though!
If the government were an investor in gold then you might have a point - but they are not. Further any loss is a paper loss only (rather than an actual loss as Brown did).
But are we talking English billions or the American version that is supposed to be dying out?
Forcing down the price of gold so that banks could afford to buy it in order to underwrite their assets by some complicated banker/wankery.
So not stupid after all, just the usual worshipful attitude to banks that continues to this day
LOL.
I'm not sure why the OP reckons the chancellor should be speculating on the gold market.
I presume this is a joke thread, as a retort to the accusation that Gordon Brown lost so much money when he sold our gold.
However, as an assets value only becomes relevant at the point it is sold, and as Gideon hasn't sold any gold, he can't have "lost" us any money as we still hold the asset and could sell it at a higher (or lower) price in the future.
Quite shocking that the OP is out by 10x the amount. Out of interest, with today's prices, how much of a loss did Brown cost us?
It's the opposite. The English version is dying.
The state of the budget is irrelevant as the money from the gold was used to buy other reserves - unlike the Tories who sold assets to foot the long term mass welfare dependency bill they created, Brown was just diversifying the reserves from just gold into other currencies.
Around £4.5 billion. And at the peak of nearly $1900 an ounce the figure was £8 billion.
I'm not sure whether the op is trolling or not. Even the ardent Brown supporters concede that selling off our gold was not his finest move.
Well that's just garbage, we weren't even running a deficit when the gold was sold, one of the main reasons was that the price was in long term decline and market analysis pointed to it continuing to decline, its also around this time oil fell to $11 a barrel and pundits were saying the price was unlikely to ever recover and the oil companies were finished.
All this proves is that Governments are at the mercy of the markets when it comes to buying and selling commodities and sometimes they call it right and sometimes they don't. Nobody can predict the future.
Really no budget deficit, I would look again.
Lol. Thanks for that. Spat out my Tea it was so funny.
Hilarious. Do you not understand supply and demand? Gordon Darth Vader Brown announced the sale of the gold 1 year in advance. Such a big sale sent the price of gold crashing. As Nigel Farage said even an A Level economics student wouldn't have made such a mistake.
To add insult to injury, Crash Gordon sold the gold for Euros, which also devalued. Such was the Iron Chancellors grip of economics.
But weird things are happening with gold. Ukraine's 'evaporated', other countries are trying to repatriate their gold* and then stuff like this-
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-12-16/commodity-trading-giant-exits-physical-gold-due-lack-physical-documented-origin
But the biggest surprise in this story was the reason why Gunvor chose to discontinues its gold trading. Per Bloomberg, "executives decided to abandon the precious metals trading business partly because of difficulties in finding steady supplies of gold where the origin could be well documented, one of the people said."
Given all the gold speculation and derivatives created, it must get quite complicated to keep track of who owns or has loans based on/against an oz of physical gold.
(*which must be an interesting logistical challenge shifting tonnes of gold around)
exactly 10/10
as i keep saying to the FIAT monkeys that Gold isnt money
you have your paper ill have my gold
we'll see who goes to zero first
Or more. You can turn gold into something shiney, like jewellry. Or useful, like corrosion resistant conductors (HDMI cables don't really count).
Borrowing against it seems to be a bit of an issue. You can't really do it 'over and over again' because your loan should be based on the value of your gold as security against those loans. If there's rehypothecation, then it gets even trickier, especially if the gold isn't there..
Eh? Wasn't it about 1.60 to the pound then and less than 1.30 now?
Gold is money, everything else is credit - JP Morgan