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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lorne who wrote (32243)	4/21/1999 8:43:00 PM
From: goldsnow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116762

White House Favors Selling Gold Wednesday, 21 April 1999 W A S H I N G T O N (AP) THE CLINTON administration thinks it is a good idea for the International Monetary Fund to sell some of its gold to help reduce the debt burden of poor countries, Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said today. Such a sale, which Congress would have to approve, would be conducted carefully to minimize harm to gold holders, producers in Nevada and the gold market in general, Summers told a House Banking subcommittee on international monetary policy. Several lawmakers have said they want to examine any administration proposal to sell IMF gold. Other wealthy G-7 nations also have called for tapping the gold to finance an IMF-World Bank debt relief initiative. IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus said the initiative would be discussed at the spring meetings of the two organizations just getting under way. The G-7 nations also will tackle the subject at their summit in June in Cologne, Germany. Camdessus said there was a "proliferation of proposals" from the IMF's major shareholders to increase debt relief for the world's poorest nations, most of them in Africa. "There is broad consensus the time has come to take further steps to reduce debt," Camdessus said, but governments still have to decide how they will pay to do this. Summers said the amount of gold the IMF is considering selling is dwarfed by the amount of gold that typically comes into the market each year. "The London gold market alone has a daily turnover of the order of 850 to 1,200 tons," Summers said. "Against this, the sale of 150 to 300 tons, over the space of quite a number of years, would be small fry, indeed." "We think that mobilizing a modest amount of the IMF's gold in this way is a sensible and prudent approach," Summers said, "and is far preferable to an ever greater reliance on bilateral contributions from IMF members" to the debt relief initiative.