by Ronan Manly, BullionStar:

“In the Governor’s absence I attended the meeting in Zijlstra’s room in the BIS on the afternoon of Monday, 10th December to continue discussions about a possible gold pool. Emminger, de la Geniere, de Strycker, Leutwiler, Larre and Pohl were present.”

13 December 1979 – Kit McMahon to Gordon Richardson, Bank of England

Introduction

A central bank Gold Pool which many people will be familiar with operated in the gold market between November 1961 and March 1968. That Gold Pool was known as the London Gold Pool.

This article is not about the 1961-1968 London Gold Pool. This article is about collusive central bank discussions relating to an entirely different and more recent central bank Gold Pool arrangement. These discussions about a second Gold Pool began in late 1979, i.e. more than 11 years after the London Gold Pool had been abandoned. This article is Part 1 of a 2 part series. Part 2 will be published shortly.

These discussions about a new Gold Pool arrangement took place in an era of soaring free market gold prices and in the midst of the run-up in the gold price to US$850 in January 1980.

The discussions and meetings about a new Gold Pool in 1979 and 1980 and beyond which are detailed below, occurred at the highest levels in the central banking world and involved the world’s most powerful central bankers, some of whose names will be familiar to readers. The aim of these central bank discussions and meetings was to reach agreement on joint central bank action to subdue and manipulate the free market gold price in the early 1980s. Many of these collusive meetings were private meetings between a handful of Group of 10 (G10) central bank governors, and took place in the actual office of the president of the Bank of International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland.

Above all, these central bank meetings show intent. Intent by a group of powerful central banks to manipulate a free market gold price so as to distort free market gold pricing signals. So these documents are timeless in that regard. The documents also illustrate the concern that a rising gold price in the free market creates for senior central bankers, and importantly, also shows that these same central bankers have no qualms, at least from a legal or moral perspective, of intervening to manipulate a gold price when they see it as a threat to their fiat currency monetary system.

The 1961-1968 London Gold Pool was a collusive arrangement between 8 major central banks to attempt to keep a lid on the official gold price at US $35 per ounce. That Gold Pool was instigated at the headquarters of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basle, Switzerland and monitored at the BIS by the governors of the Pool’s member central banks. However, day-to-day activities of the 1961-1968 Gold Pool were executed by the Pool’s agent, the Bank of England in London. Hence it was dubbed the London Gold Pool. Famously, this London Gold Pool collapsed on Thursday 14 March 1968 when speculative buying in the London Gold Market overwhelmed available Gold Pool supplies from member central banks.

Whereas the members of the 1961-1968 London Gold Pool consisted of the central banks of the United States, United Kingdom, West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Belgium and Italy, the discussions about a new Gold Pool that took place in 1979, 1980 and beyond, involved the very same central banks.

The 1961 -1968 Gold Pool was both a selling syndicate, where the members pooled their gold reserves to intervene in the London gold market, and a buying syndicate where the member central banks attempted to replenish gold that had been used in the gold price capping operations. Similarly, as you will see below, the discussions on a new Gold Pool in 1979 and 1980 involved participant West European central banks which on the whole wished to be able to buy gold for the Pool as well as sell gold from the Pool.

Central to illustrating how the most powerful central bankers in the world colluded to attempt to establish a new Gold Pool are a number of internal documents from the Bank of England which provide a detailed blueprint on the evolution of these collusive discussions at the BIS, as well as providing detailed insights into the thinking of the senior Bank of England executives involved in the meetings. These internal correspondence documents from 1979 and 1980 can be thought of as the equivalent of internal emails in the era before corporate email systems.

As you will see below, so many names of high level central bankers crop up in the discussions and documents, that to provide context, this necessitated some short background summaries on who these people were and what roles they occupied. It is also necessary to provide some brief context on gold price movements during the period under discussion.

The Gold Price Run-up during 1979 and 1980

When the London Gold Pool collapsed in mid-March 1968, a two-tier gold market took its place, with the private market gold price breaking higher, while central banks continued to trade gold with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) and US Treasury at the official price of US$ 35 per ounce. However, in August 1971, Nixon closed this FRBNY / Treasury ‘Gold Window’ by ending the convertibility of US dollar liabilities into gold that had been an option for foreign central banks and foreign governments. This was the birth of the free-floating gold price.

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