Gordon Brown's gold-owning democracy

I've been emailed a link to this article, which reminds us that Brown decided to sell the bulk of the Bank of England's gold a while back, netting about £2.3 billion, and that had it been sold at today's prices, this would have netted about five times as much, so in theory, the taxpayer has made a 'loss' of £10 billion, or at least not made that amount of profit (which would by and large be just on paper if we just left it in the vaults).

Fair enough, Brown handled the sale badly by announcing it in advance, thus depressing the market price slightly, but I do wonder how many of those people who are whining now made the decision at the time to buy gold? And what is £10 billion in today's money? It's about five days' worth of public spending/waste, big deal.

Let's contrast that with the loss suffered by the taxpayer as a result of the council house sell-offs, which were deliberately and calculatingly far below market value. In round terms, let's call it two million units and a loss of £70,000 on each, that's a loss of £140 billion, so which you can add about £60 billion extra Housing Benefit paid to the owners of those units where the original purchaser had moved out, so the loss to the taxpayer is around £200 billion (big margin of error) i.e. twenty times as much as the notional loss on the gold sales, that's nearly three months' worth of public spending

Hmmm.

What this boils down to is that Brown made a huge mistake by presenting this as an economic decision, by which he sold the stuff at or close to market prices to private investors, rather than a political decision to create a "gold-owning democracy". Had he done a Thatcher and sold it at undervalue to a defined class of deserving UK investors, would people still be complaining like this? I know that I would - the fact I could kick myself for not having bought gold ten years ago (to match HM Treasury's sale thereof) is an entirely separate issue, but that was my decision.