Our Opinion
The World Gold Council heavily criticised the British Government and the Bank of England for the way it handled its gold sales programme. Originally, we disagreed with the WGC criticism, as we believed the propaganda the British Govennment issued that the move to reduce the proportion of gold in its reserves was in line with modern monetary thinking. Of course it remained to be seen whether this was merely a fashion which in time would be revealed to be flawed. We are annoyed for allowing ourselves to be so easily duped by the politicians of the day.

Market Effect
It was always likely that the regular large amounts of gold which were being placed onto the open markets by this and other Central Bank sales would have a depressing effect on the market price for a number of years.
At the time of the last few auctions, we were forecasting that gold would start to rise once these sales came to an end. We were wight, and had, if anything, underestimated the effect.

Gold Auctions Revisited September 2007
Looinkg back at this page in September 2007, we see we were right that the end of gold sales appears to have influenced gold prices in the upward direction, but we also now believe we were wrong to give Gordon Brown the benefit of the doubt at the time. With the great advantage of hindsight, we think the gold producers, and the World Gold Council were right to criticise the auctions. Gordon Brown, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, managed to sell a large proportion of Britain's gold reserves at the lowest price for a quarter of a century.
At the time we defended Brown, we did not know that he had been advised at the time by leading bankers against the sales.
These gold auctions earned him the nickname Golden Brown.

Lowest Gold Prices in Recent Times The lowest dollar gold price in recent years was the afternoon fix on 20th July 1999 when gold fixed at $252.80 US equivalent at the time to £161.091 in pounds sterling. The lowest recent gold price in pounds sterling based on the London Gold Fix was £157.033 on the a.m. fix of 10th September 1999, which was equivalent to $256.20 USD. The reason there are two different "lows" is due to the differences in exchange rates on the relevant dates.

Our 1999 Gold Price Forecast
While we were wrong by being too kind to Gordon Brown in 1999, we were busy commenting that gold was, in our opinion, too cheap, and also that so called financial journalists were parroting cheap headlines, such as "Gold Has Lost Its Glitter", pointing out that gold prices had gone down over the past quarter century, was a bad investment, etc.
Part of our simple argument at the time, was that the time to buy any investment, commodity, share, was when it was at its lowest, and also when pundits were being gloomy about it. We were absolutely right, and the hacks were wrong.
With hindsight, anpother argument we should have use is that if Gordon Brown thought selling gold was a good idea, then the best thing to do was to buy gold. Jeremy clrkson famously apologised for calling Gordon Brown a "One-eyed Scottish idiot", adding that he was wrong to call him Scottish.

IMF Revaluation & Gold Sales

Swiss National Bank Gold Sales