New Gold Pool at the BIS Basle: Part 2 – Pool vs Gold for Oil

Jon Economy

This is Part 2 of a two-part series. The series focuses on collusive discussions and meetings that took place between the world’s most powerful central bankers in late 1979 and 1980 in an attempt to launch a central bank Gold Pool cartel to manipulate and control the free market price of gold. The meetings centered around the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basle, Switzerland.
Part 2 takes up where Part 1 left off, and begins by looking at developments in the BIS Gold Pool discussions during January 1980, a month in which the US dollar gold price rocketed more than 60% during a three-week period to reach a then record of $850 per ounce. Part 2 then looks at how the discussions involving these central banks evolved over the remainder of 1980 and 1981 as key high level central bankers continued to call for intervention into the gold market.
Part 2 also looks at evidence that central bankers party to the discussions began advocating gold for oil exchanges between the West and the Saudis, exchanges which would provide real wealth (gold) to the Arabs in exchange for oil flowing to the West, while simultaneously keeping a lid on the gold price.

This post was published at Bullion Star on 23 May 2017.