Why does UK hold so small amount of gold?
Why does UK hold so small amount of gold?
Oliver Stewart
Michael Rodriguez
Why my country not on this list?
Wtff
Hudson Adams
>One decision stands out as downright bizarre, however: the sale of the majority of Britain’s gold reserves for prices between $256 and $296 an ounce, only to watch it soar so far as $1,615 per ounce today.
>When Brown decided to dispose of almost 400 tonnes of gold between 1999 and 2002, he did two distinctly odd things.
>First, he broke with convention and announced the sale well in advance, giving the market notice that it was shortly to be flooded and forcing down the spot price. This was apparently done in the interests of “open government”, but had the effect of sending the spot price of gold to a 20-year low, as implied by basic supply and demand theory.
>Second, the Treasury elected to sell its gold via auction. Again, this broke with the standard model. The price of gold was usually determined at a morning and afternoon "fix" between representatives of big banks whose network of smaller bank clients and private orders allowed them to determine the exact price at which demand met with supply.
>The auction system again frequently achieved a lower price than the equivalent fix price. The first auction saw an auction price of $10c less per ounce than was achieved at the morning fix. It also acted to depress the price of the afternoon fix which fell by nearly $4.
>It seemed almost as if the Treasury was trying to achieve the lowest price possible for the public’s gold. It was.
Jaxon Bennett
>One of the most popular trading plays of the late 1990s was the carry trade, particularly the gold carry trade.
>In this a bank would borrow gold from another financial institution for a set period, and pay a token sum relative to the overall value of that gold for the privilege.
>Once control of the gold had been passed over, the bank would then immediately sell it for its full market value. The proceeds would be invested in an alternative product which was predicted to generate a better return over the period than gold which was enduring a spell of relative price stability, even decline.
>At the end of the allotted period, the bank would sell its investment and use the proceeds to buy back the amount of gold it had originally borrowed. This gold would be returned to the lender. The borrowing bank would trouser the difference between the two prices.
>This plan worked brilliantly when gold fell and the other asset – for the bank at the heart of this case, yen-backed securities – rose. When the prices moved the other way, the banks were in trouble.
>This is what had happened on an enormous scale by early 1999. One globally significant US bank in particular is understood to have been heavily short on two tonnes of gold, enough to call into question its solvency if redemption occurred at the prevailing price.
>Goldman Sachs, which is not understood to have been significantly short on gold itself, is rumoured to have approached the Treasury to explain the situation through its then head of commodities Gavyn Davies, later chairman of the BBC and married to Sue Nye who ran Brown’s private office.
>Faced with the prospect of a global collapse in the banking system, the Chancellor took the decision to bail out the banks by dumping Britain’s gold, forcing the price down and allowing the banks to buy back gold at a profit, thus meeting their borrowing obligations.
Bentley Reyes
They sold half of it in the 90s, retardedly during some of it's lowest value points.
They also sold a lot of it during the 70s and 60s I think when the country was pretty much bankrupt and needed a bailout by the IMF in 1976
Robert Evans
What do you mean? You are in the first place.
Kayden Thompson
kek
Liam Clark
huh I never knew the logic behind it, so it was the government cucking itself to private banks so they won't take a loss
Daniel Evans
Trudeau sold all of ours off
Liam Parker
Why would you want to hold gold?
You can't eat it.
You can't sleep on it.
You can't make anything useful with it.
You can't invest it.
It won't keep you warm.
It won't keep you dry.
It won't keep you alive.
If you just have it, and don't do anything with it, it's exactly the same as if you don't have it at all. Aesop worked this out thousands of years ago.
Aaron Parker
Someone's need's to rename that USA to Israel
John Richardson
Lack of transparency in your government.
Henry Harris
Whatever you say master
Nolan Smith
Because Gordon the Moron Brown sold it off to deliberately fuck us up.
Austin Wilson
> tfw Trudeau sold all the gold
Logan Johnson
>Why would you want gold
because the people who print Fiat Currency Value Gold
Isaac Edwards
GORDON CUNTING BROWN
Michael Sanchez
>Lebanon has more gold then all of Spain
Remember when the Spanish empire was the wealthiest and most powerful empire in the world?
Elijah Butler
their corrupt politicians sold it at its lowest value then went con$ulting for big banks once they left office
Leo Gonzalez
That just be why they stole Venezuela's gold that they were supposed to be holding in trust
Ian Reyes
Why have gold reserves when you can have scissors reserves?
Jackson Bennett
The last time the spanish had a big amount of gold and silver they cause an inflation across eurasia, better let them stay poor
Jose Hall
Damn, we got ALL da gold! Fuck the rest of you poorfag countries, cant even have 4K tons of gold...we got over 8K. Fuck all you poor ass countries. Why dont you just stop being so poor and get some fucking gold already?
Bentley Green
>Aesop worked this out thousands of years ago.
1,000 years of being proven wrong.
Carter Clark
The gold standard put a hard limit on states' abilities to run large deficits though inflation. If you were to go back to that type of system you would have to radically reign in the amount of money spent which is why libertarians still support it.
Milton Friedman already worked out the ideal monetary policy which is steady low inflation to encourage investment and economic activity (prevent currency hoarding) and then a cash relief valve for private banks when there was a run on them.
Matthew Scott
You can sell it for food, it is useful as a conductor and making items that last forever, it can buy clothes, shelter.
Give me 1 ounce of gold and I'll give you all the things you need to live for 1 month.
Luis Russell
third. fuck yea
Dylan Stewart
Are there bullion dealers in the UK?
I thought that was mostly a North American thing
Hudson Cooper
>You can't eat it.
you can exchange it for food
>You can't sleep on it.
you can but the ground is better and you can exchange it for a bed
>You can't make anything useful with it.
geology.com
>You can't invest it.
yea you can
>It won't keep you warm.
>It won't keep you dry.
>It won't keep you alive
you can exchage the gold for all of this things
Landon Robinson
>america number one
>no one has been allowed to film at fort know since the 80's
hahaha
Brandon Campbell
Because we ain't run by Jews
Jason Hughes
>Uzbekistan is richer than the UK
lmao
Levi White
We sold it all during the 2008 financial crisis. Gordon Brown even got a shit price for it because he retardedly told people of his intention to sell it beforehand.
Angel James
Of course. Assay offices too. Who do you think we are m8?
Ayden Long
So basically we sold it at the lowest point to bail the world's banking system out. To stop the constant boom and bust caused by banks using gold to make a very quick but potentially risky buck.
Of course not to mention Gordon Brown had ties with the very people that benefited from the sale/gifting of the gold.
Hudson Nguyen
Guaranteed replies
Adrian White
Not even their banks, a foreign bank. And the brits took a loss a 13 billion dollar loss.
In return the banks were able to continue their fraudulent behavior and grow bigger so they could commit more damage to the economy in 2007.
Excellent play there, Gordon.
How nobody offed this fool is beyond me.
They fucking rewarded him with the office of the Prime MInister.
Easton Torres
Its not yours either, the turbo kikes Rothschild own 80% of israel. And they also make sure no one knows where their gold is hidden.
Nolan Jones
Let me first tell you why it was chosen as a store of value in the first place.
It does not corrode.
It's high malleability made it the easiest metal to make coin from.
It's high density (one of the densest of metals) makes it almost counterfeitproof.
You can not make a silver coin, coat it in gold and claim it's gold. You can make a hollow gold coin, coat it in silver and claim it is silver.
It's scarcity made it so that when all savings in a society had to be represented by all the gold in that society, a small amount of gold already represented a large amount of savings. If you would have chosen copper, everyone would need to haul 3 pounds of copper to buy furniture from a carpenter.
Platinum was too scarce, copper was too abundant, steel corroded, silver was more easily counterfeited by coating a hollow gold coin with silver coating.
For these reasons gold was selected as the metal of choice.
Now why did we need a metal to trade goods and exchange services?
Because it provides a system of basically a public ledger that can not be messed with through any other way than mining it, which is very laboursome.
All other ledgers have been based on trust.
Fiat money is a public ledger. It costs way less than 100 dollars to create a 100 dollar bill. But we trust the government to not create them at maddening speeds which would debase our savings.
With gold, no trust in people or an institution is needed. Just a trust in nature that tomorrow it wont rain golden asteroids out of the sky.
Most of the time however, trust in government is relatively good and there is no reason to prefer a money deriving its value from a trust in natural occurences to a money deriving its value from a trust in man made systems and contracts.
Nonetheless there are times where this is no longer the case and an avalanche of debt issuance / money printing makes people lose confidence. In the US this happened in the late 1970's for example.
Hudson Watson
Gotta say, thats pretty cucked. Good thing that the burgers stole errr safely deposited our gold in the land of freedom, where our morally bancrupt pozdems cant get it
Justin Adams
Yeah, I mean he chose us as a martyr for some rich Jews that fucked up because their greedy genes wanted a bigger figure next to their name. So despite it being nothing of our making, he decided along with his ties to Gavyn Davis who's somehow linked with his wife, to off load our wealth. Not use diplomacy to split it numerous ways, not just leave it as the rest of the world did.
Way he went about it was odd too, announced in advance his plans to the market plummeted. It was all totally wrong.
Brayden Allen
cont.
During the late seventies, yield on government debt increased significantly.
As the yield rose, the interest expense payable on debt became larger, forcing the government to take up more debt.
This is a viscous circle that usually ends in hyperinflation for most nations.
For the US however this is different.
The US stayed in a relative form of stability as the gold price rose slightly in tandem with the yields
At it's peak, the gold reserve of the United States equaled almost a quarter of all debt outstanding.
In other words, if the US wanted to no longer issue debt on which they would have to pay a massive interest, they could have opted to sell some of their gold reserves and do so for a significant period of time, thereby starving the bond market of a new supply of bonds.
Whilst they did not resort to this measure, I believe the sheer possibility of doing so caused the bond market to cool down.
Gold reserves of a country basically function as a backstop for bond market panic.
If such an episode would to reoccur at this point in time, gold would likely rise to somewhere between 10000-50000 dollars per ounce (bit dependent on how long it would take and how fast the debt would rise)
Parker Morris
That was the plan for greater israel all along.