The Gordon Brown Gold Indicator

Otherwise known as 'The Brown Bottom'

This courtesy of USA Gold:

Recently, with gold pressing $700, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, on cue, renewed his push for International Monetary Fund gold sales. There was a time when Brown's antics were cause for alarm in the gold market, but no more. As it turns out, one of the more reliable indicators of an impending spike in the gold price is Gordon Brown pressuring the IMF to sell its gold.

Just prior to the Bank of England sales in 1999, Brown pressured the IMF to sell a portion of its gold. When that sale failed to materialize, he prevailed upon the Bank of England to sell instead. Gold hit a bottom shortly thereafter at $280 and then sharply rallied to $450 per ounce, the beginning thrust of the current bull market. Then again in 2005, Brown was knocking on the IMF's door trying to persuade it to sell, and again he was turned back. Gold, which had been stalled in the low-$400s, promptly found new life this time rising to over $700 per ounce -- the second leg in the bull market.

Brown's latest attempt to persuade the IMF to sell gold suggests that the bullion banks are still having difficulty finding physical gold, and if that is the case, they are likely to bid up the price to meet whatever obligations are on the table. If the past is an indicator, Gordon Brown's new call for IMF gold sales might be predicting another explosive move upward.

Brown's latest IMF call was not widely reported in the UK press. He made it at an IMF Committee meeting during his trip to Washington last week.