1999–2002 sale of United Kingdom gold reserves

The sale of UK gold reserves was a policy pursued by HM Treasury over the period between 1999 and 2002, when gold prices were at their lowest in 20 years, following an extended bear market. The period itself has been dubbed by some commentators as the Brown Bottom or Brown's Bottom.

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The period takes its name from Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who decided to sell approximately half of the UK's gold reserves in a series of auctions. At the time, the UK's gold reserves were worth about US$6.5 billion, accounting for about half of the UK's US$13 billion foreign currency net reserves. There are various later estimates of the cost of that the decision to British taxpayers, for example £2 billion (The Sunday Times, 2007) and £7 billion (The Daily Telegraph, 2010).

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