Sale Of UK Gold Reserves, 1999–2002
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Sale Of UK Gold Reserves, 1999–2002
The sale of UK gold reserves was a policy pursued by HM Treasury over the period between 1999 and 2002, when gold prices were at their lowest in 20 years, following an extended bear market. The period itself has been dubbed by some commentators as the Brown Bottom or Brown's Bottom. The period takes its name from Gordon Brown, the then UK Chancellor of the Exchequer (who later became Prime Minister), who decided to sell approximately half of the UK's gold reserves in a series of auctions. At the time, the UK's gold reserves were worth about US$6.5 billion, accounting for about half of the UK's US$13 billion foreign currency net reserves. There are various later estimates of the cost of that the decision to British taxpayers, for example £2 billion (''The Sunday Times'', 2007) and £7 billion (''The Daily Telegraph'', 2010). Events The UK government's intention to sell gold and reinvest the proceeds in foreign currency deposits, including euros, was announced on 7 May 1999, w ...
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Chancellor Gordon Brown Official Portrait
Chancellor ( la, cancellarius) is a title of various official positions in the governments of many nations. The original chancellors were the of Roman courts of justice—ushers, who sat at the or lattice work screens of a basilica or law court, which separated the judge and counsel from the audience. A chancellor's office is called a chancellery or chancery. The word is now used in the titles of many various officers in various settings (government, education, religion). Nowadays the term is most often used to describe: *The head of the government *A person in charge of foreign affairs *A person with duties related to justice *A person in charge of financial and economic issues *The head of a university Governmental positions Head of government Austria The Chancellor of Austria, denominated ' for males and ' for females, is the title of the head of the Government of Austria. Since 2021, the Chancellor of Austria is Karl Nehammer. Germany The Chancellor of Germany, denominat ...
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Bank Of England
The Bank of England is the central bank of the United Kingdom and the model on which most modern central banks have been based. Established in 1694 to act as the English Government's banker, and still one of the bankers for the Government of the United Kingdom, it is the world's eighth-oldest bank. It was privately owned by stockholders from its foundation in 1694 until it was nationalised in 1946 by the Attlee ministry. The Bank became an independent public organisation in 1998, wholly owned by the Treasury Solicitor on behalf of the government, with a mandate to support the economic policies of the government of the day, but independence in maintaining price stability. The Bank is one of eight banks authorised to issue banknotes in the United Kingdom, has a monopoly on the issue of banknotes in England and Wales, and regulates the issue of banknotes by commercial banks in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The Bank's Monetary Policy Committee has devolved responsibility for ...
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Political Scandals In The United Kingdom
This is a list of political scandals in the United Kingdom in chronological order. Scandals implicating political figures or governments of the UK, often reported in the mass media, have long had repercussions for their popularity. Issues in political scandals have included alleged or proven financial and sexual matters, or various other allegations or actions taken by politicians that led to controversy. In British media and political discourse, such scandals have sometimes been referred to as political sleaze since the 1990s. Notable scandals include the Marconi scandal, Profumo affair and the 2009 expenses scandal. 1890s *Liberator Building Society scandal, in which the Liberal Party MP Jabez Balfour was exposed as running several fraudulent companies to conceal financial losses. Balfour fled to Argentina, but was eventually arrested and imprisoned. 1910s * Marconi scandal of insider trading by Liberal Party Ministers including: ** Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading ...
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Gold In The United Kingdom
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal in a pure form. Chemically, gold is a transition metal and a group 11 element. It is one of the least reactive chemical elements and is solid under standard conditions. Gold often occurs in free elemental (native state), as nuggets or grains, in rocks, veins, and alluvial deposits. It occurs in a solid solution series with the native element silver (as electrum), naturally alloyed with other metals like copper and palladium, and mineral inclusions such as within pyrite. Less commonly, it occurs in minerals as gold compounds, often with tellurium (gold tellurides). Gold is resistant to most acids, though it does dissolve in aqua regia (a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid), forming a soluble tetrachloroaurate anion. Gold is i ...
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2000s Economic History
S, or s, is the nineteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ess'' (pronounced ), plural ''esses''. History Origin Northwest Semitic šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative (as in 'ip'). It originated most likely as a pictogram of a tooth () and represented the phoneme via the acrophonic principle. Ancient Greek did not have a phoneme, so the derived Greek letter sigma () came to represent the voiceless alveolar sibilant . While the letter shape Σ continues Phoenician ''šîn'', its name ''sigma'' is taken from the letter ''samekh'', while the shape and position of ''samekh'' but name of ''šîn'' is continued in the '' xi''. Within Greek, the name of ''sigma'' was influenced by its association with the Greek word (earlier ) "to hiss". The original name of the letter "sigma" may have been ''san'', but due to the complica ...
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1999 In Economics
File:1999 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The Death and state funeral of King Hussein, funeral procession of King Hussein of Jordan in Amman; the 1999 İzmit earthquake kills over 17,000 people in Turkey; the Columbine High School massacre, one of the first major List of school shootings in the United States by death toll, school shootings in the United States; the Year 2000 problem ("Y2K"), perceived as a major concern in the lead-up to the year 2000; the Millennium Dome opens in London; online music downloading platform Napster is launched, soon a source of Online piracy, online piracy; NASA loses both the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander; a destroyed t-55, T-55 tank near Prizren during the Kosovo War., 300x300px, thumb rect 0 0 200 200 Death and state funeral of King Hussein rect 200 0 400 200 1999 İzmit earthquake rect 400 0 600 200 Columbine High School massacre rect 0 200 300 400 Kosovo War rect 300 200 600 400 Year 2000 problem rect 0 400 200 600 Mars ...
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2000s In The United Kingdom
The history of the United Kingdom began in the early eighteenth century with the Treaty of Union and Acts of Union. The core of the United Kingdom as a unified state came into being in 1707 with the political union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland, into a new unitary state called Great Britain. Of this new state of Great Britain, the historian Simon Schama said: The Act of Union 1800 added the Kingdom of Ireland to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The first decades were marked by Jacobite risings which ended with defeat for the Stuart cause at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. In 1763, victory in the Seven Years' War led to the growth of the First British Empire. With defeat by the United States, France and Spain in the War of American Independence, Great Britain lost its 13 American colonies and rebuilt a Second British Empire based in Asia and Africa. As a result, British culture, and its technological, political, constitutional, and linguis ...
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1999 In The United Kingdom
Events from the year 1999 in the United Kingdom. This year is noted for the first meetings of the new Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales. Incumbents *Monarch – Elizabeth II *Prime Minister – Tony Blair (Labour) *Parliament – 52nd Events January * January – Vauxhall launches a facelifted Vectra to improve its disappointing ride and build quality. * 1 January – The Euro currency is launched, but Britain's Labour government reportedly has no plans to introduce the currency here, preferring to stick to pound sterling instead. * 13 January – Unemployment has fallen to just over 1,300,000 – the lowest for 20 years. * 30 January – England national football team manager Glenn Hoddle gives an interview to ''The Times'' newspaper in which he suggests that people born with disabilities are paying for sins in a previous life. February * 1 February - Allan Clark joined one of the UK's largest banking firms * 2 February – The Football Association dism ...
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Gold Investments
Of all the precious metals, gold is the most popular as an investment. Investors generally buy gold as a way of diversifying risk, especially through the use of futures contracts and derivatives. The gold market is subject to speculation and volatility as are other markets. Compared to other precious metals used for investment, gold has been the most effective safe haven across a number of countries. Gold price Gold has been used throughout history as money and has been a relative standard for currency equivalents specific to economic regions or countries, until recent times. Many European countries implemented gold standards in the latter part of the 19th century until these were temporarily suspended in the financial crises involving World War I. After World War II, the Bretton Woods system pegged the United States dollar to gold at a rate of US$35 per troy ounce. The system existed until the 1971 Nixon Shock, when the US unilaterally suspended the direct convertibil ...
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Economic History Of The United Kingdom
The economic history of the United Kingdom relates the economic development in the British state from the absorption of Wales into the Kingdom of England after 1535 to the modern United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland of the early 21st century. Scotland, England, and Wales shared a monarch from 1601 but their economies were run separately until they were unified in the 1707 Act of Union. Ireland was incorporated in the United Kingdom economy between 1800 and 1922; from 1922 the Irish Free State (the modern Republic of Ireland) became independent and set its own economic policy. Great Britain, and England in particular, became one of the most prosperous economic regions in the world between the late 1600s and early 1800s as a result of being the birthplace of the industrial revolution that began in the mid-eighteenth century. The developments brought by industrialization resulted in Britain becoming the premier European and global economic, political, and military ...
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Gold As An Investment
Of all the precious metals, gold is the most popular as an investment. Investors generally buy gold as a way of diversifying risk, especially through the use of futures contracts and derivatives. The gold market is subject to speculation and volatility as are other markets. Compared to other precious metals used for investment, gold has been the most effective safe haven across a number of countries. Gold price Gold has been used throughout history as money and has been a relative standard for currency equivalents specific to economic regions or countries, until recent times. Many European countries implemented gold standards in the latter part of the 19th century until these were temporarily suspended in the financial crises involving World War I. After World War II, the Bretton Woods system pegged the United States dollar to gold at a rate of US$35 per troy ounce. The system existed until the 1971 Nixon Shock, when the US unilaterally suspended the direct convertibil ...
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European Exchange Rate Mechanism
The European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM II) is a system introduced by the European Economic Community on 1 January 1999 alongside the introduction of a single currency, the euro (replacing ERM 1 and the euro's predecessor, the ECU) as part of the European Monetary System (EMS), to reduce exchange rate variability and achieve monetary stability in Europe. After the adoption of the euro, policy changed to linking currencies of EU countries outside the eurozone to the euro (having the common currency as a central point). The goal was to improve the stability of those currencies, as well as to gain an evaluation mechanism for potential eurozone members. As of July 2021, three currencies participate in ERM II: the Danish krone, the Croatian kuna and the Bulgarian lev. Intent and operation of the ERM II The ERM is based on the concept of fixed currency exchange rate margins, but with exchange rates variable within those margins. This is also known as a semi-pegged system. Be ...
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