Gordon Brown is a historian by education, so he might just appreciate the fickleness of posterity. Over a decade at the Treasury from 1997 to 2007, he did many things that he might believe should be widely remembered. Yet few, if any, of his decisions live as clearly in memory as ‘Gordon Brown sold the gold’.
Brown sold the gold. He raided pensions. He put 75p on pensions
Exactly 25 years ago, Brown’s Treasury stunned the gold markets by starting to sell of much of the UK’s gold reserves. In total, 395 tonnes of gold were sold over three years, yielding $3.5 billion (£2.8 billion) in revenues. That’s a big number, but far smaller than the current value of 395 tonnes of gold, which would be somewhere north of $25 billion (£19.9 billion).
Those numbers mean it’s hard to view the gold sale as a great move, even if it was in keeping with conventional economic wisdom at the time.
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