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

by Ronan Manly, BullionStar:

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.

Summary of Part 1

The first article in the series, published on 16 May and titled “New Gold Pool at the BIS Basle, Switzerland: Part 1”, concentrated on events and developments in late 1979 and revealed, among other things, that:

A series of meetings of the world’s most powerful central bank governors were held in late 1979 at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) office of BIS Chairman and President Jelle Zijlstra in Basle, Switzerland. The objective of the meetings was discussion of a central bank consortium that would operate a collusive Gold Pool to manipulate the price of gold. Note that this was more than 11 years after the London Gold Pool had collapsed in March 1968.

At the IMF annual conference in Belgrade in early October 1979, the US monetary authority delegation in the form of Paul Volcker, William Miller, Tony Solomon, and Henry Wallich approached Fritz Leutwiler, Chairman of the Swiss National Bank, and discussed a proposal to launch a joint central bank gold selling operation.

During the discussions at the BIS and between the central bankers at various locations, Zijlstra, who was BIS President until the end of 1981, and Leutwiler, who became BIS President in January 1982, were both strongly in favour of launching a new joint central bank gold pool to manipulate the gold price.

The oil-producing cartel OPEC was at that time, “increasingly concerned that gold was outpacing oil”, but Al Quraishi, Governor of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA) had made an assurance that the Saudi’s “would not rock the boat” and buy gold on the market if a new gold pool was activated. However, Al Quraishi and SAMA were still eager to “diversify” the reinvestment of the Saudi oil revenues into gold.

The Bank of England recorded market intelligence in October 1979 that the “USA was planning to sell 10 million ounces of gold in four separate unannounced operations” before the end of 1979 so as to “placate the Saudi Arabians.“

The Bank of England’s foreign exchange and gold specialist at that time, John Sangster, thought that there was “a need to break the psychology of ‘the market can only go one way and that is up’.”

Sangster’s view was also that there was “no question of any permanent stabilisation of the gold price, merely at a critical time holding it within a target area”, an operation he called a “smoothing operation”.

A meeting to discuss a new collusive gold pool took place in the BIS office of Zijlstra on Monday 12 November 1979, whose invitees (in addition to Jelle Zijlstra) were Gordon Richardson, Governor of the Bank of England, Cecil de Strycker, Governor of the National Bank of Belgium, Fritz Leutwiler, Chairman of the Swiss National Bank, Bernard Clappier, Governor of the Banque de France, and Otmar Emminger, President of the Bundesbank.

A follow-on meeting about the collusive new gold pool took place in the BIS office of Zijlstra on Monday 10 December 1979, attended by Zjilstra, Kit McMahon of the Bank of England, Otmar Emminger, outgoing President of the Bundesbank, Karl Otto Pohl, incoming Bundesbank President, de la Geniere, the incoming Governor of the Banque de France, de Strycker, Governor of the Belgian central bank, Leutwiler, Chairman of the Swiss National Bank, and Rene Larre, BIS General Manager.

The December meeting, which was facilitated by BIS general manager Rene Larre, also revealed that “European central banks would intend to buy back in due course any gold they sold”, that the Gold Pool could be funded by buying gold first so as to create an inventory of physical gold to use for selling operations, and that in McMahon’s words “if the scheme were to be simply a BIS one, publicity would not necessarily, or perhaps desirably, arise”

Based on the detailed briefing of the content of that meeting at the BIS on 10 December, which was written by the Bank of England’s Kit McMahon for the benefit of the Bank of England Governor Gordon Richardson, the proposed new gold pool, among other things, would sell gold “only when gold was relatively strong and the dollar relatively weak and [buy] only in the reverse circumstances.”

In the 10 December 1979 meeting at the BIS, the Bundesbank was against the Gold Pool plan due to what Bundesbank President Otmar Emminger attributed to opposition from the Bundesbank Central Bank Council. However, the Bundesbank was thought, by the Bank of England’s Sangster, to be against the Gold Pool primarily as a tactical way to force the US Fed to address the underlying problems of a weak US dollar and high inflation.

The Banque de France, which had been in favour of the Gold Pool scheme prior to October 1979, also came out in the 10 December meeting as being against the scheme due to what Banque de France governor De la Geniere described as “great political dangers…of selling any French gold” indirectly through a Gold Pool. However, Sangster also thought the Banque de France was more likely to be tactically backing the Germans so as to put pressure on the Fed to first address inflationary problems.

As per Part 1, a number of internal documents from the Bank of England are cited below. These documents provide a unique road map on the evolution of the collusive discussions at the BIS and the thinking of the Bank of England executives involved in and supporting the discussions. Documents are rendered in blue text and italics, with bold, underlining, and a few cases of red text added where appropriate.

January 1980 BIS Gold Pool Meeting

Following the Gold Pool meeting at Zjilstra’s office in the BIS headquarters on 10 December 1979, the central bank governors next met at the BIS in Basle on 7 January 1980 during their monthly scheduled ‘Basle Weekend’. The afternoon London Gold Fix was set at $431 on 10 December 1979, but by 4 January 1980 it was already 36% higher at $588.

Gold Price in US Dollars, September 1979 to April 1980. Source: BullionStar Gold Charts
In preparation for the January meeting about the proposed Gold Pool, which took place on Monday 7 January 1980, John Sangster, the Bank of England’s foreign exchange and gold specialist, wrote the following briefing document titled “SECRET” to the attention of the Governor’s Private Secretary (G.P.S.) as well as to the attention of Bank of England Executive Director Kit McMahon. The Governor of the Bank of England at that time was Gordon Richardson.

To recap from Part 1, Christopher McMahon, known as ‘Kit’ McMahon, became Deputy Governor of the Bank of England on 1 March 1980, taking over that position from Jasper Hollom. Prior to becoming Deputy Governor, McMahon was an executive director at the Bank of England from 1970 to 1980. McMahon signed his internal Bank of England memos and correspondence with the initials ‘CWM’, short for Christopher William McMahon. McMahon left the Bank of England in 1986 to take up the role of Chief Executive and Deputy Chairman of Midland Bank. Midland Bank was taken over by HSBC in 1992. See profiles of McMahon here and here.

Gordon Richardson was Governor of the Bank of England for 10 years from 1973 to 1983. Before that, he was a non-executive director of the Bank of England between 1967 and 1973. Richard was chairman of J. Henry Schroder Wagg from 1962 to 1972, and chairman of Schroders from 1966 to 1973. After leaving the Bank of England, Richardson went on to be a director of Saudi International Bank in London. He also headed the influential Group of Thirty (G30) central bank lobbyist group, and was chairman of Morgan Stanley International.

John Sangster’s full name was John Laing Sangster, hence he signed his internal Bank of England memos and analysis with the initials ‘JLS’.

G10 plus Switzerland

Sangster’s secret memo to McMahon and Richardson was written on Friday 4 January 1980, a day on which the afternoon Gold Fix came in at $588 per ounce. The memo addressed developments in the gold price and discussed potential joint central bank intervention into the gold market. Hand written at the top are the words “The Governor has seen : copy in Basle Dossier JB 7/1“. JB is the Bank of England’s John Balfour who was also copied on the document, and who was a Bank of England alternate director at the BIS at that time.

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