The Conservative Party

gordondaviesmoustache said:
I think by any objective measure, it was a mistake, but fuck all compared to what followed after he left office.
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I don’t think that’s actually true. My understanding was that government reserves invested elsewhere actually did better than an investment in gold would have done over the following 10 years so if the government wanted funds for investment, selling gold at that point actually worked out as being preferable to selling other investments.
 
west didsblue said:
I don’t think that’s actually true. My understanding was that government reserves invested elsewhere actually did better than an investment in gold would have done over the following 10 years so if the government wanted funds for investment, selling gold at that point actually worked out as being preferable to selling other investments.
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We sold at $275 per ounce (and the sale reduced the price of gold by about 10% because of the quantities and the fact it was heralded) (all off Wiki tbf) and it’s now over $1,600 per ounce, which is an increase of about six times. I’m pretty sure gold was at a historically low price at the point he sold it.

He could have had far more money to invest elsewhere if he’d disposed of it differently. it wasn’t the sale per se, but rather the method and the timing that were questionable. That was the mistake as I understand it.

Happy to be corrected though.
 
gordondaviesmoustache said:
We sold at $275 per ounce (and the sale reduced the price of gold by about 10% because of the quantities and the fact it was heralded) (all off Wiki tbf) and it’s now over $1,600 per ounce, which is an increase of about six times. I’m pretty sure gold was at a historically low price at the point he sold it.

He could have had far more money to invest elsewhere if he’d disposed of it differently. it wasn’t the sale per se, but rather the method and the timing that were questionable. That was the mistake as I understand it.

Happy to be corrected though.
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Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of it, and I was basing my post on something I read some time ago that I can’t find, even todays value of that gold would have only amounted to less than a quarter of what Liz Truss squandered during her disastrous tenure, less than what Sunak threw away when he cancelled HS2 and amounts to less than 1% of GDP. Even if the sale was a cock up, its negative effect on today’s economy is lost in the noise and drawing attention to it is purely political in the same way as they like to draw attention to the 2010 Treasury note to try and pretend that Labour can’t be trusted with the economy to distract the fact that they’ve spent 14 years getting most people in the position where they’re worse off now than they were when they came into power.
 
west didsblue said:
Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of it, and I was basing my post on something I read some time ago that I can’t find, even todays value of that gold would have only amounted to less than a quarter of what Liz Truss squandered during her disastrous tenure, less than what Sunak threw away when he cancelled HS2 and amounts to less than 1% of GDP. Even if the sale was a cock up, its negative effect on today’s economy is lost in the noise and drawing attention to it is purely political in the same way as they like to draw attention to the 2010 Treasury note to try and pretend that Labour can’t be trusted with the economy to distract the fact that they’ve spent 14 years getting most people in the position where they’re worse off now than they were when they came into power.
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I pretty much said all that in my first post!
 
gordondaviesmoustache said:
We sold at $275 per ounce (and the sale reduced the price of gold by about 10% because of the quantities and the fact it was heralded) (all off Wiki tbf) and it’s now over $1,600 per ounce, which is an increase of about six times. I’m pretty sure gold was at a historically low price at the point he sold it.

He could have had far more money to invest elsewhere if he’d disposed of it differently. it wasn’t the sale per se, but rather the method and the timing that were questionable. That was the mistake as I understand it.

Happy to be corrected though.
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Hindsight. Even Switzerland was selling gold at the time.
 
west didsblue said:
Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of it, and I was basing my post on something I read some time ago that I can’t find, even todays value of that gold would have only amounted to less than a quarter of what Liz Truss squandered during her disastrous tenure, less than what Sunak threw away when he cancelled HS2 and amounts to less than 1% of GDP. Even if the sale was a cock up, its negative effect on today’s economy is lost in the noise and drawing attention to it is purely political in the same way as they like to draw attention to the 2010 Treasury note to try and pretend that Labour can’t be trusted with the economy to distract the fact that they’ve spent 14 years getting most people in the position where they’re worse off now than they were when they came into power.
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gordondaviesmoustache said:
I pretty much said all that in my first post!
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I don’t think it mattered what he did with the gold, the Tory war machine couldn’t stomach him succeeding Blair and was going to blow something up to attack him. It didn’t have to be something important, making a mess of a bacon sandwich like Milliband would have done just as well.

In the end a mistake costing £5bn isn’t much when you’re chancellor for a decade spending 500-700Bn a year.
 
gordondaviesmoustache said:
Not in the quantities and with the methods we were, I’ll hazard.
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Belgium, Canada and the Netherlands had already sold 1,590 tonnes between them since 1990. In 1997 alone, Argentina and Australia sold a combined 290 tonnes.
And in April 1999, Switzerland voted in a referendum to sever the Swiss Franc's gold backing, effectively approving a plan to sell 1,300 tonnes from its 2,590-tonne hoard.
 
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