Thomas Pascoe: Revealed -- Why Gordon Brown sold Britain's gold at a knock-down price

Goldman Sachs, which is not understood to have been significantly short on gold itself, is rumoured to have approached the Treasury to explain the situation through its then head of commodities Gavyn Davies, later chairman of the BBC and married to Sue Nye, who ran Brown's private office.

Faced with the prospect of a global collapse in the banking system, the Chancellor took the decision to bail out the banks by dumping Britain's gold, forcing the price down and allowing the banks to buy back gold at a profit, thus meeting their borrowing obligations.

...

The one thing politicians ought to have bought with that money was a lesson in the structural restraints that needed to be placed on banks now that the principle that they were ultimately public liabilities had been established.

It was a lesson that could have acted to restrain all players in the credit market boom of the 2000s. It was a lesson nobody learnt.