When Gordon Brown and Peter Costello wantonly sold of their respective country’s gold they seem to have taken several other countries down according to today’s Daily Reckoning: “The second FT article said that “Gold sales cost Europe’s central banks $40 bn.” Central banks in France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Portugal followed Britain’s 1999 example and sold large chunks of their gold reserves when gold prices were around US$280. They sold around 3,800 tonnes of gold for around $56 billion, according to the FT. The FT reckons if they’d kept those gold reserves and not bought government bonds with the proceeds, those banks would be $40 billion better off. That would come in handy today, wouldn’t it?

As an aside, can you see how upside-down the world is? The ECB prints money to buy bonds. The Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and the U.S. Federal Reserve all do the same thing. Meanwhile, central banks are selling a real tangible asset like gold. These people are supposed to be guardians of sound money with steady purchasing power? They seem to aiming for the exact opposite.”

http://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/gold-sales-cost-europes-central-banks-billions/2009/05/08/

Many people wonder if the Australian Gold mining community will ever fully recover from Costello’s actions. www.australian-gold.com/decline.html