Central banks kept conspiring against gold long after it left the economic organisation.

showing an attempt by central bankers in 1979 to create a second "gold pool" to control the price of the monetary metal, may be most important because, while they are 37 years old, they show the central bankers conspiring against the monetary metal long after it was officially removed from the international financial system.That is, in 1971 the United States revoked convertibility of the dollar to gold for other nations and in 1976 the Jamaica Accords confirmed that currencies were no longer officially tied to gold under the Bretton Woods system. These circumstances continue to prevail today, at least nominally.But in 1979, the documents show, central bankers still feared gold's influence on currencies, commodities, and the general price level. A conspirator from the Bank of England wrote of the need of central banks to sell gold "to break the psychology" of a rising gold market market, as they had done during the first gold pool, the London Gold Pool of 1961-68.Signifying the interest of the United States particularly in breaking the gold price, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker is recorded as proposing a central-bank gold-selling operation involving up to 10 percent of the gold reserves of the participating nations.Saudi Arabia is described as very concerned about the relationship of gold and oil prices and fearful that gold is getting ahead of oil. Central banks are said to have discussed rumors that the United States is secretly selling gold to Saudi Arabia to assuage its concerns that oil was too cheap.The Bank for International Settlements is described as prepared to function as the gold broker for the major central banks if they decided to undertake a new gold pool, the first having been the London Gold Pool of 1961 to 1968.Central bankers are recorded as favoring selling gold when it was strong and repurchasing when it was weak, a policy that disappointed the United States, which, predictably enough, wanted the European central banks to sell their gold outright and let it go, presumably to eliminate competition for the U.S. dollar and its hybrid, the Special Drawing Rights of the U.S.-controlled International Monetary Fund, in accordance with longstanding U.S. policy: