www.silverdoctors.com/bloomberg-london-g...ferred-to-hong-kong/
I tried to find a Youtube video for this, but you can see a video on the link of this being discussed on Bloomberg.

Gordon Brown weren't it iirc.
Organized a one day sale of 'Britain's' gold?

knobmeup wrote: This goes beyond that. That was approximately 12 years ago. Actually there is a wiki article about that here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sale_of_UK_gold_re...s,_1999%E2%80%932002

But he sold about half of Britain's gold reserves, as the wiki articles states. This video suggests that in the last few years virtually all reserves have been disposed of.

How the fuck are we gonna make posh watches and wedding rings?
Thay aint thought this through

I do wonder about this centralization of gold reserves. The classic model of states holding reserves has gone. The gold has gone.
Now aside from the silly money game and trinkets...gold does have some interesting potential uses.

knobmeup wrote: It's probably over-estimated because of its historic association with money, but it does have more practical value than fiat obviously. But literally the British government is getting shut of everything that isn't nailed down. Our entire economic system is now reliant on consumerism (although none of the products are made here obviously), house price inflation, war profiteering, oil (although virtually all the North Sea oil is gone and most oil used in Britain is imported from Norway) and financial manipulation. There is nothing else left. And we're still haemorrhaging money at the same rate as five years ago. We've sold and privatised everthing and we're still in the same economic position as when we started, actually worse because there's far more debt and far more money owed due to PFIs.

Aye, it aint pretty is it and it doesn't bode well for folk.

If you look at gold prices it's not very popular,everybody is getting rid,you might even say it was in free fall.

I wonder if all the hype over the internet for the last five or so years was to manipulate the market and make some people very rich off the back of worried middle pyramid dwellers.

they should have bought bitcoins

humanspirit wrote: I haven't got the time to answer this properly, but I totally agree with your presumption.

You can read a little bit about what is currently going on here:

kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_Dail...ge_$400_In_2014.html

www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f356b78a-67d1-11e3-8a...0.html#axzz2o1kvsrL4

It's actually reaching the point where it is physically impossible to produce gold at even cost price, obviously this cannot continue for very long.

In terms of the stock market, the price of everything is completely irrational. I was going to post about this the other day...just to emphasise how irrational it is the dollar fell the other day against the pound, which was attributed to employment figures in Britain; you may have seen that unemployment officially fell. This might not be the real reason at all because so much of the trading is done by computers now that have no comprehension of such news that it's virtually impossible to say what causes anything. However, let's assume it's correct for the sake of argument. Unemployment has gone down due to workfare, zero hours contracts, companies hiring interns right, left and centre and employing increasing numbers of people on fixed-term contracts and part-time hours. Obviously we all know that this isn't good for labour. So 'the market' just responded to a piece of news which is bullshit, and then added value to the pound, even though there is absolutely no basis for this. So when you look at the stock market, there is so much manipulation and false speculation going on that the prices just bear no relation to reality.

The price of oil has fallen over the last year. Is there suddenly more oil? Is oil less useful? Has printing billions and trillions of dollars made money more valuable? Obviously not, but the markets are just ridiculous. In the long run, I can only see commodities greatly increasing in price, or else the entire system will have to be reset, while maintaining all of the existing debt somehow, or both.

dawnbreak wrote: Yeah, I wish I'd bought some when I first heard about them, but I didn't really feel I had the technical knowhow.

dawnbreak wrote:
Ive got bitty coins,is that the same?

WUB's bit coins are just as daft and useless as any other currency/object

The thing you hold in your hands/bank account/web account is only ever worth the amount someone else will trade you for it

I'd be interested to get a bit more detail regarding your opening post, source etc. As Banks do not have giant vaults full of gold bars owned by the 'country' , that's a hollywood Oceans 11 myth

Most people/countries gamble on selling something that someone else might want to make a profit

The world revolves around trade....you have something I need so I'll give you this in exchange

The gold standard of exchange has been dead for about 20 years as the value of gold plummited

dawnbreak wrote: But they increased in price by about 10,000% in three years. If you bought £1,000 worth at the bottom and sold them at the top, you'd have £100,000 (and this was tax free at the time). This may be daft, but it's worth having.

and if you bought £10 of BT shares when the buzby adverts where out in the 80's your holding in BT would be worth much more too

It is hedging your investment hoping for a higher return

Normal people would call it gambling but the City of London likes to call it Investment Banking

As a general rule people tend to buy gold when markets and financial institutions are in a bad way so if Chinese are buying lots of gold does that mean Chinese stocks are in trouble or their banks?

humanspirit wrote: It's generally assumed that they're buying it as an alternative to US treasury bonds, they are still the largest holder in the world. A conservative view would be that they're diversifying their interests, a more radical view would be that they want to create a new world reserve currency (which they've stated openly) and have it backed by gold:

www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-13/chinas...new-reserve-currency

@wubs and humanspirit


do you really believe there are vaults full of physical gold bars being sold off and bought by buy someone else?

The money men in America have a tendency of slapping any other country down when those countries leaders try to break free of the dollar and trade in other currencies.

Can't see the USA doing that to China can you?

dawnbreak wrote: It's hard for me to say, but based on what the guy is saying in the video, then yes. Obviously, I'm not in the privileged position of being let into bank vaults.
humanspirit wrote: I fully believe it is matter of when, not if, China becomes the unchallenged and unchallengable world superpower.

dawnbreak wrote:
It could be a total facade,it wouldn't surprise me but it would be total speculation on my behalf.

WAKE_UP_BOMB WROTE
Do you expect them to need to use military force to uphold their future position in world events or will they have achieved this by means where they have no need to use violence?