How are your gold reserves?

[jake-the-peg]

OK for all of you who go on about Gordon Brown selling UK gold reserves cheap

- Here's a chance to prove it's not just 20:20 hindsight

The Telegraph is claiming gold prices will double in 5 years

http://www.telegraph....00-in-five-years.html

How much of your savings are you taking out of the bank and putting into Gold?

[rov1200]

Every time the price of gold goes up I think of Gordon Brown's recklessness in selling the stuff off so cheaply. To exchange it for £'s is even a worse sin when it has been depreciating for some years.

At least when you sell your property and seeing it increase in value afterwards is offset by your new purchase which will also increase in value.

When we switched from the gold standard to paper money the rot truly set in.

[R1Geezer]

Haven't got any savings, jake, Gordon took it all and more and fcuked my pension and destroyed 60,000 small businesses with IR35 still can't complain there are many worse off than me.

[youngmafbog]

Neither have I R1,thanks to Gordon 1/2 my money goes to the state to fund left wing ideals or be funneles to labour heartlands.

Gordon F***d up there is simply no excuse. You do not flog your gold at the bottom and buy some flakey currency like the Euro.

[Gromit]

Brown did not cash in the Gold Reserves he sold and convert them to Stirling. He converted the gold into a basket of international currencies, but mainy into Euros.

This was following guidelines by the European Central Bank, as a condition for a country to join the Euro. Brown made it so that if it was to our advantage to join the sine currency we could do so. But in the event we didn't.

[Gromit]

Single currency

[123everton]

To say the rot set in when we left the gold standard is incorrect, churchill took us back into the gold standard (after Chamberlain took us out of it I think) at a time of recession and high unemployment Churchill's policy resulted in Britain owning something like two thirds of the world's gold.
The euro isn't a flakey currency, it was very stable until the banking crisis, now the problem is that Wall Street (Obama included) is trying to destabilise the euro to mantain the dollar's primacy, the run on Greek bonds is coming from wall Street Alan Greenspan, George Soros etal.
The pensions crisis wasn't started by Brown either, check out Robert Maxwell and L.D.V for fund dipping, check out Royal Mail (and many others) for payment holidays, the shareholders stole your pension money and now they want you to pay it back.

[R1Geezer]

there was a lttle detail of abolishing the tax releif on pension income by Mr Brown. That will end up costing about a Trillion, about 2000 times more than what Maxwell Half inched, I'd say Brown was the biger influence here.

[123everton]

A bigger influence than the Royal Mail's payment holiday?
Of 13 years and a £2.5 billion deficit, http://business.times...ess/article392727.ece
That's just one example.
http://www.telegraph....ons-crisis-talks.html
There's another one, the list's endles, don't allow political dogma to cloud your judgement as to who swiped your money.

[Lonnie]

The real problem isn't that he sold the gold off cheaply, I think he probably got the best price for the time, its the fact that he sold it at all, he didn't need to.

Lets face it, his subsequent action in pursuit of money to waste shows what a spendthrift with other peoles money he his.

[lslowry]

just sorting my pension out when i retire in September. Thanks to Mr Brown, my pension forecast is going to be a shadow of what i was expecting, unlike Gordons gold plated one. Luckily i have my health unlike some after 44 years of work.

[ABerrant]

123everton -

Royal Mail has a pension fund deficit estimated at £10bn, £2bn of which went to the Government.

http://www.guardian.c...-mail-pensions-labour

LDV was one of the numerous pension schemes that collapsed due to the actions of private equity companies courted by New Labour, such as that of venture capitalist Sir Ronald Cohen, non-dom Labour donor.

http://www.guardian.c...onalpensions.politics

Could you now dogmatically pick out some other funds that total the value stripped from pensions through Mr. Brown's Advanced Corporation Tax, currently estimated at £150bn?

[123everton]

They're just 2 that spring to mind, Royal mail took an 13 year payment holiday as did many other pension funds, if we're going to be dogmatic it was a Tory government that allowed that.
That is were most of the money went, into the company's coffers to boost profits, into the shareholders pockets to boost prices and into the directors wallets from big bonuses for realising all of the above.
A latter day 3 card trick.

[ABerrant]

Funnily enough the Labour government also allowed the pension holiday to continue because in 1997 there was no problem with it.

Royal Mail took a pension holiday because the scheme was massively overfunded and 1988 legislation enforced contribution holidays for funds in excess of 105%. The surplus only became a deficit in 2003, 6 years after the Treasury started to remove chunks from the myriad pension pots.

[ABerrant]

BTW who exactly were RM's profiteering shareholders? (what with it being 100% owned by the Government).

[123everton]

Fair point with the R.M.