Brown told to explain why he sold UK gold reserves
cheesy_pasty
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Gordon Brown has been ordered to release information before the general election about his controversial decision to sell Britain's gold reserves.
The decision to sell the gold taken by Mr Brown when he was Chancellor is regarded as one of the Treasury's worst financial mistakes and has cost taxpayers almost £7 billion.
Mr Brown and the Treasury have repeatedly refused to disclose information about the gold sale amid allegations that warnings were ignored.
Following a series of freedom of information requests from The Daily Telegraph over the past four years, the Information Commissioner has ordered the Treasury to release some details. The Treasury must publish the information demanded within 35 calendar days by the end of April.
The sale is expected to be become a major election issue, casting light on Mr Brown's decisions while at the Treasury.
Telegraph via Yahoo
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Bottom
"Ruling Elite" = "anyone in the business of buying gold who wasn't incapacitated", I take it? Holy Crap, "Cash My Gold" is part of the Ruling Elite now! :eek:
Still, on the grand scheme of things, a £2bn loss due to mistiming (and announcing) the sale of our gold reserves is fairly paltry compared with a £178bn budget deficit in just one year, isn't it?
ROFL:D:D:D:D:D
http://www.kc3.co.uk/~dt/gold.htm
It's a bit like saying to someone how stupid it was to sell their home for £85,000 in 2001 when it's worth £136,000 today.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Priceless.
The point is there was no reason to sell the gold at the time and he sold it when gold was at a record low and he then sold it for even less than the going rate.
Complete and utter moron.
I think it was more a disingenuous act rather than that of a moron. He sold it low and even lower as a favour to his Elite mates.
Why don't other leaders sell gold as a favour to their "elite mates"? I mean it would be very easy to do, sell gold cheap to make your friends rich, just that no one actually does it.
Other leaders have.
The American public were forced to sell their gold.
Some say it was a criminal act of the government of the time on its own people.
If your money is pegged to a physical commodity such as gold or silver then it has real value. It is backed by something real that can be exchanged.
If gold and silver is taken out of the system then your money has no intrinsic value as it is tied to a fiat monetary system. You are then at the mercy of the elite who own the banks. Its only value is based on what the bankers say it is worth.
Thanks to the practice of fractional reserve banking your money is debt that has to be payed back by somebody.
It all depends on your faith in the boom and bust system of fractional reserve banking and whether you believe that economic growth within this system can carry on indefinitely or not.
Under this system how exactly does all the interest get payed back if all loans are payed back to the lender and there is no more money left in circulation? How does this happen without borrowing more money with more interest added to the new loan?
You can dismiss this as ludicrous conspiracy theory, but to do so outright without even giving this any consideration would be burying your head in the sand.
I'm sure that you believe that people with power and money don't ever conspire with each other ever. But the elite bankers do benefit when the gold standard is taken out of the system. Because then we would be forced to rely on the system that they have complete control over and which favours them.
Indeed. At least the current gold hoovering up with Cash4Gold.com, etc is only hoovering it up off morons. Back then in the USA you had to sell it to the government by law. And guess what? The gold price shot up once the gold had been hoovered up.
It's nice to know that at least someone else understands the monetary system and udnerstands that all money is debt and unless the banks keep creating money out of thin air indefinitely the whole kaboodle crashes to the ground as existing debt is paid back and the amunt of money in existence dwindles
Well said Alrightmate
It's the mindset of "If it isn't reported in the mainstream media it ain't a problem" that would pass this off as ludicrous.
It must be bliss to live in a bubble that sees the world all playing nice and under 'Queensbury Rules'
I said earlier and I'll say it again....
Unbelievable!!
I am sure he will find some way of preventing its release before the election - even though during PMQs he said he was perfectly happy for all information to be published. Oh yeah. So why has he spent so long fighting against its release.
Swiss National Bank Gold Sales
The Swiss National Bank, in common with a number of other central banks, is part way through a programme of reducing its gold stocks, and replacing them with other assets, mainly other currencies. The Bank of England are running a similar programme, but using an auction system which is well publicised. The Swiss have opted to feed theirs into the market more quietly and less visibly, undoubtedly taking day to day market conditions into account.
The Swiss Selling Gold?
When the announcement was made that the Swiss would sell a large proportion of their gold, we believe it also had a psychological influence on market sentiment for gold. The Swiss are renowned for their conservatism in monetary matters, and to many, the Swiss selling gold was just unthinkable. However in October 2001, the programme is one third through, and in recent months gold has been showing signs of new found strength.
Market Effect
It is likely that the regular large amounts of gold which have been placed onto the open markets by this and other Central Bank sales will have had a depressing effect on the market price for a number of years. In the period from May 2000 to September 2001 they sold 320 tonnes, averaging 20 tonnes per month, and in the period from October 2001 to September 2002, they plan to sell 283 tonnes, averaging 23.6 tonnes per month. At the current rate, this should see the completion of the Swiss gold sales of 603 tonnes by 2005.
As at the end of February 2002, the amount already sold is believed to be about 456 tonnes.
By January 2003, the total sold was 682 tonnes, of which 283 tonnes were sold during 2002.
The End of Gold Sales
The Bank of England's gold auctions ended in March 2002 , and the Swiss disposal will end in 2005. Other central banks will have already completed their sales programmes, or have got a substantial way though them. We firmly believe that as we near the end of these sales, their downward pressure on gold prices will be removed.
The rules and standards of evidence and burden of proof haven't changed. Merely asserting that there's a conspiracy does not make a conspiracy exist. It is not "burying your head in the sand" to dismiss assertions that are made without evidence.
No, Binky, it's the mindset of every critical thinker. The burden of proof lies with you: if you are going to assert that there was a deliberate policy of selling the United Kingdom's gold reserves in order to enrich some already wealthy individuals with whom the British Government is in cahoots, the very least you can do is name those individuals, demonstrate a link between them and those in the British Government with the power to make that decision, establish that they knew about the decision before it was announced, and show that they actually did buy our gold reserves and become wealthier as a direct result (and that they did so disproportionately).
Until you do that, no-one is under any obligation whatsoever to take your assertions seriously. That's how the game works.
Turn that on its head: it must be truly depressing to live in a bubble that sees a conspiracy around every corner.
What about Norman Lamont in 1992?
Norman Lamont can be credited with acting decisively at a given moment in time which ultimately resulted in our economy being in fine shape before it was passed on to the present lot during 1997.....
What more is there to say.....
No, come on be fair, there was a £6 billion deficit that got handed over in 1997. Just what is it now though? Oh yes that's right, £164 billion!!! :mad:
I was thinking of the ERM fiasco, for which he is mainly remembered. That was day the Conservatives lost credibility as the party that could safely handle the economy.
I'm sure you remember all this.
Unfortunately the murky world of geo-politics isn't as neat and tidy as to be easily subjected to the neat and tidy processes of academia.
No it's not. Critical thinking involves having an open mind that is willing to join up some dots itself rather than rely upon official announcements, documentary evidence and selective reporting/lies from mainstream media.
What you're describing is more akin to stifled thinking
That's correct and if people don't take my assertions seriously that's their problem not mine. I think people should make their own mind up.
Unfortunately I'm not depressed and neither do I see a conspiracy theory around every corner I'm just not naive enough to think the world plays by queensbury rules and I go on the notion that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ...
You seem more suited to a science forum.
Red herring. That it is not, but that doesn't give one licence in the realm of geo-politics to leap to whatever crackpot conclusions one cares to.
False. Critical thinking does not entail making certain pronouncements based on overstating every item of a set of woefully inadequate data and stringing them together with conjecture. That is the realm of the conspiracy theorist (and the priesthood). That's what your "joining up some dots" amounts to.
Ah, more straw men. I am similarly not so silly as to think that geopolitics is nice and fluffy.
...then judging by your own arguments, you conclude that it's an eighty-foot killer ostrich who destroys entire cities.
I have no problem with that observation. Science, after all, enables us to make fairly clear provisional statements about reality - in stark comparison to pseudoscience, voodoo and religion, which make precisely the same kind of appeals to "having an open mind that is willing to join up some dots itself" rather than relying on any conventional or standard methodology by which one might gather evidence or reach conclusions or inferences from them with any reasonable degree of confidence.