"The market saw gold going lower, and everyone panicked, " said Pradeep Unni, head of research at Richcomm Global Services, a Dubai-based commodity broker.

WSJ: Gold Plummets to Two-Year Low

"Everybody is out there trying to replace the former function of the floor broker, " says Steve Sanders, a managing director and head of business development at Interactive Brokers.

FORBES: A New Kind Of Exchange

Mr Annan has agonised in public about the UN's failure in Rwanda, when he was head of un peacekeeping, and has argued that his success as a peace-broker in Kenya last year owed something to the existence of R2P as a moral instrument.

ECONOMIST: Responsibility to protect

But Dino Kos, a former head of markets at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (and now a strategist for Portales Partners, a broker), says the new requirement almost guarantees that an auction will not fail.

ECONOMIST: Sovereign-debt managers