Gordon Brown: I made a big mistake on banks

chewmylegoff

B_Blank wrote: »

Selling our gold so cheap was his crowning acheivement.

not really. sold at $300. the loss to taxpayers was estimated to be £2bn when the price was at $900. So the "loss" to taxpayers compared to today's prices might be £4bn.

this is hardly his "crowning achievement" when compared to the size of the budget deficit he left behind.

chucky

MrEnglish wrote: »

He was wrong to sell all that gold to the banks when it was $300 oz now its almost $1500 oz and on its way to $8000.

But he must have had his re4asons, or incentives....

not that it matters but it was just over half that he sold not all the gold reserves.

i wouldn't actually blame him - i'd blame the people giving him advice to sell it. he made a decision (a bad one) on the information that he had.

kabayiri

Is our political system set up to support the development of our long term future ?

Is squeezing ideological change like the restructure of our entire NHS system into a single term a good idea ? Perhaps these things should be trialled more extensively.

I believe Gordon Browns' intentions were good, but the execution of change was poor.

grimsalve

Butterfly_Brain wrote: »

At least he has the balls to admit it. Ca-moron and his cronies would blame labour, lib dem or anyone else they could slither behind

And Blair blamed Major, Thatcher blamed Callaghan, Wilson blamed Heath, etc. They're all as bad as each other.

It's a pity none of these MPs actually have the interests of the UK as their primary concern. It's all about their own power and popularity and having someone else to blame.

chewmylegoff

chucky wrote: »

not that it matters but it was just over half that he sold not all the gold reserves.

i wouldn't actually blame him - i'd blame the people giving him advice to sell it. he made a decision (a bad one) on the information that he had.

except that the evidence appears to be that he was strongly advised not to do it (by everyone except for ed balls), but did it anyway.

ninky_2

tbh we're all just tinkering around the edges of triviality with the gordon brown issue anyhow.

the real power in such a situation does not (and did not) lie with national legislators.

Loughton_Monkey

Anyway. The point is, will the war crimes trial of Tony Blair (Iraq) conflict with the High Court Fraud trail of Gordon Brown for prime time television? What do we reckon? Death penalty for the former. If a few thousand off MP's expenses gets you a year or so, then Brother Brown's crimes must mean we are looking at 'Life'. They should bang up Darling for a bit of complicity. And Harriet Harperson ought to be sent down just for the sake of it.

Radiantsoul

chewmylegoff wrote: »

except that the evidence appears to be that he was strongly advised not to do it (by everyone except for ed balls), but did it anyway.

I think most people at the time thought it was a good idea and that it had been executed.

angrypirate

Radiantsoul wrote: »

I think most people at the time thought it was a good idea and that it had been executed.

The advice at the time was not to sell it. Also, common sense say that if you are going to sell large volumes of something on the open market, dont announce that you are going to sell it first - you'll only drop the price further.

People on here can complain as much as they want about Cameron blaming Brown, but ultimately it was Labour who ran up a national debt of nearly 1 trillion pounds and that is one big fcuk up that is Labours. Its not the banks, its not the Torys, its Labours.

IronWolf

gold prices had pretty much flatlined for 20 years, the decision to sell seems a lot worse with hindsight, but at the time he didn't know gold prices would surge. After all, he'd ended boom and bust

The way in which he sold it though was truly a screw up.