Just out of interest,the price of gold & Gordon Brown.

[Guy Fawkes]

A little bit of 'Googling' shows me that Gordon Brown sold-off 395 tons of between 1999-2002 gold at $282 an ounce,the latest price of gold (BBC News) is $1,911 an ounce seems a hefty loss ? What was the purpose of selling gold at that price and time ?

Just speculation but maybe he needed to sell it then to help finance his Government spending and to make it appear that everything was rosy in the British economy when it wasn't and without this sudden injection of cash into treasury coffers we might have had the economic crash we have just experienced earlier (it could be argued that by having it then it would have been less servere) It was a mistake to sell at those prices but maybe it was neccessary for him to have to sell them whatever the price was then.

Gordon Brown also benefitted massively from the sale of G3 licenses to mobile phone companies who paid well over the odds for them which may also have helped to hide the massive black hole in the public finances he was presiding over, giving a false sense that the economy was in good shape but in truuth, running at a loss every year and adding to the vast national debt / Government budget overspend.

 

[HovaGirl]

Lets face it? - What use is gold anyway? You can't eat it, you can't use it for fuel, can't be used for brewing beer, you can't smoke it. No use in the food supply chain whatsoever.

Handy for making cavity fillings for your teeth & bullion blocks are handy as doorstops. Apart from that??.....

Gold is what backs all currencies. When you wave your Euros, Dollars or Pounds around, those notes are backed by the same value in gold. Or they were, in the UK, until the incompetent and ignorant Gordon Brown sold much of it. Bankruptcy is when a currency doesn't have the gold to back it, and when all other assets are worth less than the amount of currency going around. Had Mr Brown held on to this gold, he could now be selling it at this much higher price, and the UK would be less in debt. Which is, of course, the debt he primarily caused in the first place with his spendthrift policies where money was flung at the benefits system and into other black holes in the state machine. The UK now actually raises less in taxes than it forks out in benefits. How is the UK supposed to pay for the schools, hospitals and police, if the tax income won't even pay for it?

 

[HovaGirl]

Can anyone tell me what the actual point of having a shit load of gold is? In Dirk Lehman's terms please.

When it all goes tits up I don't want gold, I want to be able to house myself and eat, not walk around like a pimp.

Well, when the world's great economies finally crumble, we will all have to find something else to barter with. You might do plumbing for me, for which I might pay you in food, and, I might mow your lawn for you, for which you might pay me in food. But if we want to actually buy something, then we might have to pop out to Sainsbury's with a purse full of little goldie bits.

 

[ALBION28]

Lets see. Sold house in the seventies for £2,500. Yet same house would be worth £300,000 now. I must have been a fool to do that. Look you make a decision to sell at the market rate at the time. All governments were selling at that point. It was seen as practically worthless. I recall at auctions I attended that no one was paying much for gold coins. Times change. As they say every dog has its day. The future will look very different to now and things you think are worthless now could become so so valuable...I still mourn throwing out my beatle card collection in the seventies, seemed worthless at the time...they would now sell for £600! So without a crystal ball we are doomed to make this mistake. Guess the answer is keep everything.

 

[HovaGirl]

nah, im sure this must have been the conservatives fault in some way, shape or form

In 1997, the Blair Government inherited the healthiest UK economy for decades, bequeathed to them by the outgoing Conservative Government under John Major. It was so healthy, Chancellor Brown congratulated himself by declaring that boom and bust were over, so he went on a massive spending spree, and sold much of one of the UK's major assets, the gold. He persuaded all and sundry to vote Labour, so cut taxes, increased the numbers of State jobs, increased benefits payments (not just to Brits but to practically the whole world) and increased immigration to impossible levels, just to create more Labour voters. And that is apart from changing voting boundary lines to shuffle more labour votes their way. Now, the Coalition Government has almost an impossible task to turn it all around. Cameron might just manage it on his own, but his hands are tied by the soul-searching LibDems, who haven't learnt a thing while in Government. But whatever Cameron does, and however well he does, there will be loud voices screaming that he's an unfeeling piece of Tory scum who only wants to pander to the rich. If you want to know which Government actually panders to the rich, think Mandelson. How does a man who has been sacked more than once from a Labour Government, re-emerge a few years later, being able to afford to buy an £8million pound house?

 

[CHAPPERS]

How does a man who has been sacked more than once from a Labour Government, re-emerge a few years later, being able to afford to buy an £8million pound house?

What's the cost of his house got to do with anything?

 

[beorhthelm]

Why use gold? - it is a non reactive metal and therefore lasts without tainting - I believe that it is the only element that does this making it highly desirable

Silver tarnishes but thats easily removed, Platinum and a few others are non-reactive. but not shiney, as sten_super points out. really comes back to its base aesthetic quality.

Gold is what backs all currencies.

we all left the gold standard decades ago.

currencies now rely on trust in the state issuing them, which for the most part is good enough. at the end of the day, when you look at the history of money, gold relied on the same, people had to trusti the coinage was genuine, not clipped, contained other materials or otherwise debased.

 

[HovaGirl]

What's the cost of his house got to do with anything?

Where did he get the money to buy it? How can he afford to buy an £8m house?

 

[Storer 68]

Bank notes have the statement "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ....." printed on them, this is what gives them their worth,

Why is that quote not used on coinage above £1 if it is what guarantees the value of the note? Does the promise not apply to coinage, given that we now have a £1, £2 and a £5 coin ?

 

[HovaGirl]

Silver tarnishes but thats easily removed, Platinum and a few others are non-reactive. but not shiney, as sten_super points out. really comes back to its base aesthetic quality.

we all left the gold standard decades ago.

Yes, we left the Gold Standard just before the Great Depression of the 1920/30s, but currencies are backed by a nation's assets, which includes gold. When a nation starts "printing" money, it means there are no assets to back it up, rendering that money increasingly worthless. Today, there is a new, local, version of the Gold Standard, which is called the Euro. Luckily, the UK kept out of that one. Prior to that was the ERM, which the UK escaped from, hence John Major was able to beef up the UK's economy in the 1990s. But the scenario today is very similar to the scenario which precipitated the Great Depression and the real worry is whether people start to distrust the banks, and withdraw their money and keep it under the mattress. To some extent, that has probably already happened in the UK, because of the very low interest rate being paid to savers. When the banks in some of the troubled countries start faltering in paying the salaries of their customers, then the problems could get very much worse, because that means the banks themselves are having difficulty in accessing money.

 

[sten_super]

Why is that quote not used on coinage above £1 if it is what guarantees the value of the note? Does the promise not apply to coinage, given that we now have a £1, £2 and a £5 coin ?

I would imagine that's simply a result of their history. Coins were at one time made of precious/semi-precious metals which actually were worth the value of the coin - hence there's no 'insurance' necessary. You were simply exchanging £1s worth of precious metal for another good worth £1.

 

[CHAPPERS]

Where did he get the money to buy it? How can he afford to buy an £8m house?

I don't know and it's not my business. These people aren't JUST politicians though are they, they are advisors to companies and sit on various boards and what not.

A hell of a lot of politicians are extremely wealthy, not just Mandelson.

 

[HovaGirl]

I don't know and it's not my business. These people aren't JUST politicians though are they, they are advisors to companies and sit on various boards and what not.

A hell of a lot of politicians are extremely wealthy, not just Mandelson.

A lot of them get wealthy through the business contacts they make while in politics. Can't blame them, really, but they should be open about it.

 

[El Presidente]

Where did he get the money to buy it? How can he afford to buy an £8m house?

From his memoirs I would imagine.

 

[paddy]

As for the selling of gold, no one has yet answered exactly what benefit holding gold has for an economy such as ours.

Well I would imagine it would certainly have been of use in quelling the fears over the UK's sovereign debt crisis. Who knows, having a large asset rising in value may have served to suppress the interest rates on UK bonds to the extent that we wouldn't have to engage in such substantial spending cuts to appease the market.

Then again, I suspect it's just the Tories fault and we should thank Gordon for spending the money he raised from gold sales on his disastrous PFI projects which cripple this country's economy for years to come. The biggest scandal of all is that clown still retains his seat as an MP, continuing to draw a salary from the taxpayer, so we can have the benefit of him turning once ever few months to bleat on about Murdoch

 

[Gritt23]

Funny isn't it that he sold gold at a low price, and he gets stick for it, but he doesn't get the same amount of praise for buying bank shares low.

 

[*Gullsworth*]

Brown will go down in history as the architect of our current financial mire, aided and abetted by his henchmen Balls and more latterly Milliband (minor).
That they still dare to preach about the economy is so crass.

The selling off of our gold reserves on the cheap was criminal but just one of Brown's follys. Failing to reign in the banks and the credit fuelled escalation in debt highlight the hypocrisy of Brown's 'prudence, prudence, prudence' mantra. The whole 'feel good' factor under New Labour was a sham based on the excesses of the banks. Makes me feel sick.

Cameron and Osbourne are no saints but no one should forget they (if not them someone else would have inherited the same poisoned chalice) now have the unenviable task of trying to sort out the structural defict. It is tragic that so many ordinary people are now having to feel the pain of the cutbacks. Rightly we expect the bankers to feel their share of this but it was Brown who let them get away with it for years. If left unchecked the burden of debt allowed to accumulate under Brown would cause us to go under, submerged in servicing the spiralling cost of the deficit.

And what have been Osbourne and Camerons response to the "banks unchecked burden of debt"......please do enlighten me, and while you are at it tell me how an "elected" goverment can blindly ignore rises in gas/electricity prices unheard of before while utility companies profits continue to swell shareholders coffers!
All the Utility watchdogs are not worth a wank IMO and this shithouse goverment looks the other way, strange when you think of it, the poorest having to pay while shareholders benifit.

 

[drew]

What do you mean? The point is, it is viewed as having an inherent value, it is a tangible asset. Governments hold it as part of their portfolio of tangible assets, alongside buildings, land, etc. etc.

Historically countries tied their currency to gold, e.g. £1 was worth a certain amount of gold, which theoretically you could go to the Exchequer and redeem, although that's not been the case for a number of years.

More instinctively, gold should hold it's value regardless of inflation in the monetary system - the idea being that if a gold bar is currently worth £10,000 and will buy you (say) 100 cows, if we experienced hyperinflation and gold was worth £1,000,000, your gold would still buy you 100 cows. It holds its value over time.

Yes, historically. The value of a currency now is linked to the state of the economy in the country and the interest rates set by the central bank, surely. Gold is like any other asset. It's value is immaterial until you decide to sell. It's no good bleating about the value now compared to when it was sold because in years to come, the value will be higher than now.

Bank notes have the statement "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ....." printed on them, this is what gives them their worth, you could have taken your note and demand to be paid out that sum at a bank in gold when our currency was linked directly to the gold standard, therefore banks had to hold enough in gold reserves to pay out on all the printed money and coins in circulation that it had issued.

This direct link has now gone and i believe (but could be wrong) that the Government / banks would now be responsible should there suddenly be the demand for every pound in circulation to be cashed in at once (for either gold or other currencies etc) Gold was therefore used as a guarentee to ensure that a nations wealth held its value and can be used to fund their money - if this wasn't available, there would be a run on the curency and the whole currency could become worthless. You can't cash them in though, the phrase on the notes is merely a reference to the history of banking. The bank of England website says 'What is the Bank’s “Promise to Pay”?
The words "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of five [ten/twenty/fifty] pounds" date from long ago when our notes represented deposits of gold. At that time, a member of the public could exchange one of our banknotes for gold to the same value. For example, a £5 note could be exchanged for five gold coins, called sovereigns. But the value of the pound has not been linked to gold for many years, so the meaning of the promise to pay has changed. Exchange into gold is no longer possible and Bank of England notes can only be exchanged for other Bank of England notes of the same face value. Public trust in the pound is now maintained by the operation of monetary policy, the objective of which is price stability.

We left the gold standard and to some this was a mistake, no we don't really have a way of guarenteeing our money so if a panic set in there would be little that could be done to prevent a mass devaluation of our currency (apart from printing more which also then devalues our currency) giving us less buying power abroad. Your cash is basically only worth what it is because of peoples faith in it, lose that and it loses its value.

Why use gold? - it is a non reactive metal and therefore lasts without tainting - I believe that it is the only element that does this making it highly desirable

You say it was a mistake. How many leading nations in the economic world are tied to the gold standard?

Just speculation but maybe he needed to sell it then to help finance his Government spending and to make it appear that everything was rosy in the British economy when it wasn't and without this sudden injection of cash into treasury coffers we might have had the economic crash we have just experienced earlier (it could be argued that by having it then it would have been less servere) It was a mistake to sell at those prices but maybe it was neccessary for him to have to sell them whatever the price was then.

Gordon Brown also benefitted massively from the sale of G3 licenses to mobile phone companies who paid well over the odds for them which may also have helped to hide the massive black hole in the public finances he was presiding over, giving a false sense that the economy was in good shape but in truuth, running at a loss every year and adding to the vast national debt / Government budget overspend.

Maybe that glowing economy you refer to was helped along the way with the sale of other family silver, railways, utilities etc and the windfall that was North Sea oil and gas. Labour had some windfalls but don't forget the Tory ones.

Gold is what backs all currencies. When you wave your Euros, Dollars or Pounds around, those notes are backed by the same value in gold. Or they were, in the UK, until the incompetent and ignorant Gordon Brown sold much of it. Bankruptcy is when a currency doesn't have the gold to back it, and when all other assets are worth less than the amount of currency going around. Had Mr Brown held on to this gold, he could now be selling it at this much higher price, and the UK would be less in debt. Which is, of course, the debt he primarily caused in the first place with his spendthrift policies where money was flung at the benefits system and into other black holes in the state machine. The UK now actually raises less in taxes than it forks out in benefits. How is the UK supposed to pay for the schools, hospitals and police, if the tax income won't even pay for it?

You're living in the wrong century. I say again, which leading nations have all their currency backed by gold bullion?

In 1997, the Blair Government inherited the healthiest UK economy for decades, bequeathed to them by the outgoing Conservative Government under John Major. It was so healthy, Chancellor Brown congratulated himself by declaring that boom and bust were over, so he went on a massive spending spree, and sold much of one of the UK's major assets, the gold. He persuaded all and sundry to vote Labour, so cut taxes, increased the numbers of State jobs, increased benefits payments (not just to Brits but to practically the whole world) and increased immigration to impossible levels, just to create more Labour voters. And that is apart from changing voting boundary lines to shuffle more labour votes their way. Now, the Coalition Government has almost an impossible task to turn it all around. Cameron might just manage it on his own, but his hands are tied by the soul-searching LibDems, who haven't learnt a thing while in Government. But whatever Cameron does, and however well he does, there will be loud voices screaming that he's an unfeeling piece of Tory scum who only wants to pander to the rich. If you want to know which Government actually panders to the rich, think Mandelson. How does a man who has been sacked more than once from a Labour Government, re-emerge a few years later, being able to afford to buy an £8million pound house?

Apart from the Gold, then what other assets did labour sell off. (see previous comment about the Tories selling off the family silver).

Yes, we left the Gold Standard just before the Great Depression of the 1920/30s, but currencies are backed by a nation's assets, which includes gold. When a nation starts "printing" money, it means there are no assets to back it up, rendering that money increasingly worthless. Today, there is a new, local, version of the Gold Standard, which is called the Euro. Luckily, the UK kept out of that one. Prior to that was the ERM, which the UK escaped from, hence John Major was able to beef up the UK's economy in the 1990s. But the scenario today is very similar to the scenario which precipitated the Great Depression and the real worry is whether people start to distrust the banks, and withdraw their money and keep it under the mattress. To some extent, that has probably already happened in the UK, because of the very low interest rate being paid to savers. When the banks in some of the troubled countries start faltering in paying the salaries of their customers, then the problems could get very much worse, because that means the banks themselves are having difficulty in accessing money.

How the f*** is the Euro the new version of the gold standard? Currencies are dependent on the state of a countries economy, it's ability to trade products and services.

Well I would imagine it would certainly have been of use in quelling the fears over the UK's sovereign debt crisis. Who knows, having a large asset rising in value may have served to suppress the interest rates on UK bonds to the extent that we wouldn't have to engage in such substantial spending cuts to appease the market.

Then again, I suspect it's just the Tories fault and we should thank Gordon for spending the money he raised from gold sales on his disastrous PFI projects which cripple this country's economy for years to come. The biggest scandal of all is that clown still retains his seat as an MP, continuing to draw a salary from the taxpayer, so we can have the benefit of him turning once ever few months to bleat on about Murdoch

The massive spending cuts are not wholly linked to the state of the economy and more likely linked to the incumbent governments ideology. People seem to forget that when the Tories came in, the economy was on the up but now seems to be flat lining!!!!

 

[drew]

And what have been Osbourne and Camerons response to the "banks unchecked burden of debt"......please do enlighten me, and while you are at it tell me how an "elected" goverment can blindly ignore rises in gas/electricity prices unheard of before while utility companies profits continue to swell shareholders coffers!
All the Utility watchdogs are not worth a wank IMO and this shithouse goverment looks the other way, strange when you think of it, the poorest having to pay while shareholders benifit.

Not just the cost of heating our homes though, they have done nothing about fuel prices when the price of oil has been coming down. Will be interesting see what fraction of a penny the petrol retailers will reduce their prices by as the cost of a barrel of oil drops further once there is stability in Libya.

 

[The Antikythera Mechanism]

From his memoirs I would imagine.

And from being a rent boy