can anybody help me? somebody told me that somebody in the goverment some years ago decided that gold was old fashioned and was no use keeping so we had better sell it. so a huge amount of gold was put on the market for sale. the effect it had was to drop the gold prices overnight and wipe some billions of the australian stock market. it seems then that the gold was sold to a third world country maybe thailand and as the thai government did not have the money the gold was given on loan basis. can anybody please help to confirm if this is true . my friend has told me and i am finding it hard to believe.

I have not heard that one about Australia it sounds unlikly we would do a deal in the manner you stated, but I know the British sold alot of their gold (at least a third of it I think) at the bottom of the market. I bet they regret that now.

Well, I don't know who they sold the gold to, probably a number of buyers but a fairly good history of the Aussie dollar since it was floated by the Hawke-Keating government in the '80s is here:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/6833-analyzing-the-australian-dollar-up-down-and-under-etf-ewa

it also contains a partial history and some background of the gold transactions. Just to get you started.

dax222,
Back in 1997, Costello sneakily sold off 167 tonnes of our Gold reserves over a 6 month period, so as not to alarm the market too much and to raise cash to keep his budget figures looking good.

He also lost about $1.9 billion on failed currency swaps and recently raided the Reserve Bank for around $23 billion.

He also allowed the Commonwealth unfunded super debt to grow from $70 billion to $103 billion since coming to office, until he finally had to sell off the last tranche of Telstra and creat a "Future Fund" just to pay off this self-inflicted debt.

Now we have more money flowing out of the country as dividends to foreign shareholders of privatised companies than the interest payment on the debt he inherited back in 1996.

Only now, we have less assets than we started with.

Perhaps he's not such a financial whiz kid after all?

It was a Skandinavian country I think. They used to keep a heap of gold in a cellar that was equivalent to the amount of cash floating around. Then they realised there was no need, so they sold it.