Price stability as in keeping inflation down. This might have also included maintaining reasonable foreign exchange levels. Selling non-productive assets such as gold freed up a lot of cash that as foreign exchange reserves could be and were used to protect European currencies against speculation. Bar the British pound, it was successful in Europe.* All this gold was a very old inheritance of the gold standard era and was entirely superfluous. *The BOE is the only one in Europe that tries to mimic the Fed's for-profit actions but very often to the detriment of the pound. The moral here is whenever a central bank tries to gain on trading it loses out big time and threatens its respective economy to collapse. That's why Bernanke should be decapitated in the best European tradition.
Forgive my ignorance here, but if Govt A sells gold to CountryB, CountryB will half to pay in GovtA's currency, right? In that case, don't you get a monetary injection into CountryA which would be inflationary, right? Unless the government were to retire the dollars it receieved, which won't ever happen, it would put that back in the system. In fact, if it went in as reserves, couldn't you even get a multiplier effect?? I'm sure I'm exactly wrong, but if you could help out my thinking here I'd appreciate it...