[HN Gopher] France pulls last gold held in US
___________________________________________________________________
France pulls last gold held in US
Author : teleforce
Score : 546 points
Date : 2026-04-06 08:03 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mining.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mining.com)
| carefree-bob wrote:
| Good for France to relocate gold back to their own territory,
| but, uh, how can this result in a 15 B gain?
|
| "The overall size of France's gold reserves still remained
| unchanged at roughly 2,437 tonnes, which are now entirely held at
| the BdF's underground vault in La Souterraine."
|
| Is this some special form of French accounting, where the gold
| becomes more valuable when it returns to French soil?
| kzrdude wrote:
| They sold the existing holdings and bought new of equivalent
| weight(?), so somehow they ended on profit on those moves.
| tonfa wrote:
| The profit is just realizing the gains (resetting the cost
| basis for accounting purpose).
| somenameforme wrote:
| Over about a year they sold their 'non-standard' (seems to be
| bars below the modern purity standards) US reserves, and
| replaced them with new reserves purchased elsewhere which are
| now stored in France. As the price of gold continued to rise as
| they did this, they ended up making a bunch of dinero while
| also centralizing their reserves.
| eru wrote:
| I don't understand this. Did they increase the overall amount
| of gold they held?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Sold it at the peak, and then bought it locally a few
| months later.
| rstarast wrote:
| First sell the gold, then buy same amount at a slightly
| lower price a bit later (on average)
| xvedejas wrote:
| > the price of gold continued to rise as they did this
|
| This would mean they sold low and bought high, right?
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's because they're using European mathematics. You
| wouldn't understand if you're American.
|
| In reality the article is attempting to account for a
| capital gain pnl accounting for taxes.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| price of gold dropped from $5500 to $4600 in the last few
| weeks then came back. all is possible
| mort96 wrote:
| Then they didn't make money as a result of the price
| rising, which is what the original commenter and article
| claimed.
| coldtea wrote:
| Usually that's how you want your selling and buying
| combos to be...
| berkes wrote:
| But the gold price has been rising (on average) a lot
| over the period July 2025 to January 2026
| tonfa wrote:
| From the annual report, it looks like the headline number
| (XXB gain) is just because it's realized capital gain
| (which due to their reporting requirement appears in
| their annual report, unlike unrealized gains).
|
| They have ~same amount of gold between both years and it
| doesn't look like they took extra market risk.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Impossible to make anywhere close to that amount since
| they only sold 129 tonnes
| berkes wrote:
| > As the price of gold continued to rise as they did this,
|
| Seems counterintuitive to me. This would only make gains when
| they bought the new gold before selling the old, or when
| there's some arbitrage going on between Gold/USD, Gold/EUR
| and USD/EUR.
|
| If they first sold the old for USD, then bought the new for
| USD, with a rising gold price, they'd miss the price-gain
| during the time between the trades, when they held the USD.
| It'd be a loss, not a gain.
|
| If there's some arbitrage going on, then I highly doubt that
| brings $15B gain. The differences would have to be _huge_.
|
| I think the (author (AI)) writing that article is simply
| mixing up stuff. I think this gain is not a cause-effect of
| the conversion, merely the gains from rising gold prices on
| the gold it holds over that period.
| tux3 wrote:
| The source is a press conference where they state the total
| amount and total value of gold stored hasn't changed. In le
| figaro they report the profit is due to variation in price
| between the different transactions. Which seems to be a
| polite way to say they took exceptional risk.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| They repatriated 129 tonnes in total, its was absolutely
| impossible to make $15B from that since that's what 129
| tonnes are worth in total more or less.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| They didn't repatriate the gold in the sense of
| physically moving it from the US to France. Instead, they
| sold the gold that was held in the US and used the money
| raised to buy gold from other sources, which is held in
| France.
|
| Different gold, and two financial transactions, accounts
| for the financial gain.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Yes but the article implies that they somehow made 15B in
| profit by selling the gold in US and buying an equivalent
| amount which can't be the case.
| FabHK wrote:
| What happened was that
|
| a) they bought the gold long time ago for basically
| nothing and had it on their books valued at basically
| nothing
|
| b) they sold it now (in the US) for around $15b and thus
| for accounting purposes realised a $15b gain
|
| c) they bought it back (in France) for around $15b and
| will have it on the book now valued at $15b.
|
| The fact that the gold price rose over the course of b)
| selling and c) buying doesn't matter (despite what the
| article implies). That the gold price rose between a) the
| original purchase and now b)c), that's what resulted in
| the profit.
| tonfa wrote:
| > In le figaro they report the profit is due to variation
| in price between the different transactions. Which seems
| to be a polite way to say they took exceptional risk.
|
| Nah it's just regular realized gain (delta between
| acquisition price and selling price).
|
| https://www.banque-
| france.fr/fr/actualites/resultats-2025-de...
|
| (so it's kinda irrelevant, it's just they have to put it
| in their books)
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Well they has 129 tonnes in US which happens to be wroth
| around $15B or so. Probably the author has no clue what
| they are talking about and grossly misinterpreted..
| carefree-bob wrote:
| The French gold originally deposited by France in US reserves
| in the 1950s was of the exact same purity as the French gold
| now, what is meant by "non-standard" just means "not stored
| in France".
|
| If it was a lower purity, then when they sold the 129 tons,
| they would not have obtained 129 tons of "higher purity" gold
| and still turned a profit. They would have gotten fewer tons
| of gold. Your logic has the wrong sign.
|
| Also, the fact that gold prices are rising means when France
| sold the gold and then purchased it later, the higher price
| to obtain the same quantity of gold would mean they incurred
| a loss, not a profit. Here, too, your sign is wrong.
|
| Finally, at current prices, 129 tons of gold is worth $19
| Billion dollars _in total_. It seems hard to believe that
| short term price _declines_ (which is what is needed to turn
| a profit) would be such that gold fell over 80% in value,
| which is what would be needed to sell 129 tons of gold, then
| wait a while and buy 129 tons of gold, and end up with a
| profit equal to over 80% of the price of gold in question.
|
| Moreover, rising gold prices would cause the French to earn a
| loss, not a profit
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| It's gold only if it comes from the Dore region of France.
| Otherwise it's just sparkling metal.
| sph wrote:
| That accent somehow migrated two characters too far.
| stavros wrote:
| Nah that's how it's spelled in French.
| sph wrote:
| True, but 'Dore' means golden, and would make for a
| better joke.
| pyrale wrote:
| On the other hand, Dore is an actual toponym.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monts_Dore
| rkomorn wrote:
| The French part in that sentence should be the name of
| the region (eg Dore(e) ), not "region", and if you wanted
| to use the French spelling of "region", you'd have to say
| "region Dore".
|
| Using the French spelling of region but the wrong word
| order doesn't make sense.
| stavros wrote:
| Ahh I see, thanks.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| There is no joke so funny and trivial that HN can't
| overthink and criticize it.
| stavros wrote:
| Above all, we want our comedy _accurate_.
| jjgreen wrote:
| True connoisseurs prefer the metal from Lingots.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| It's in the terroir.
| rkomorn wrote:
| Better than keeping gold in the tiroir.
| chii wrote:
| Gold in hand is worth $15B in the bush?
| wodenokoto wrote:
| My guess is they buy before selling. An increasing market with
| a large buy might increase enough to allow for a profitable
| sell.
|
| On top of this, this is physical gold, so location of the gold
| must play into it as well.
| BrtByte wrote:
| Central banks often hold gold on their books at very old prices
| omcnoe wrote:
| It's a paper gain created by mark to book accounting treatment
| of central bank goal reserves. Not a real economic gain.
|
| The US could re-create the same "gain" by selling and
| repurchasing their gold. Fundamentally doesn't really matter.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Not done for political reasons.
| oyebenny wrote:
| What makes you say that?
| Ecco wrote:
| Reading the article is what made him say that.
| berkes wrote:
| > BdF Governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau said the decision
| to keep the new bars in Paris is "not politically motivated,"
| as the higher-standard gold bars it bought were traded on a
| European market.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Well they are probably just being diplomatic, there is no
| point in accidentally triggering the ape.
| avadodin wrote:
| "We do not do this as a political statement --we simply
| want our gold ingots to exist next week."
|
| Still, a win does signal a dumb process behind the trade
| as the smart move would be to hedge with future options
| and/or futures.
|
| But then again, maybe they did hedge the trade and it's
| just not the right time or place to report it.
| tonfa wrote:
| To be fair, it's an ongoing process started in 2005 and
| which should finish in 2028. I doubt there was much
| political (tho the whole tariffs stuff probably made
| their job/decision easier when the gold price started
| diverging between NY and European markets). At this point
| it was cheaper than flying the gold to CH for recasting.
|
| (1784 tons moved to standardized holding over the years,
| 134 tons are now left to convert -- all stored in Paris)
| roenxi wrote:
| Are you suggesting they did this for technical or economic
| reasons? Like what? Is the US charging an unreasonable storage
| fee?
|
| I'd read the article, but the site seems to be down.
| arjie wrote:
| If you search Google for "France sells US gold for 13b euro
| gain" you'll find lots of results. The reasons provided
| across the various articles are:
|
| 1. The bars were of an old variety and therefore not standard
| tradable.
|
| 2. Transporting them, refining them, and recasting exceed the
| cost of selling kind #1 and obtaining kind #2
|
| Here's one such link though it appears there's some primary
| source everyone is rewriting:
| https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20260404-french-central-bank-
| ne...
|
| It appears that the gain mentioned is a realization of their
| asset value. I would also speculate that what happened is
| that they wanted LBMA bars because those are a standard
| variety and therefore easily tradable. An arbitrary LBMA bar
| is generally fungible. I would also speculate that they held
| many bars in the US from ancient times. After 2008, they
| repatriated 200-ish tonnes and 'upgraded' them (which I would
| speculate again is 'ensured they were LBMA-standard').
|
| https://www.moneymetals.com/news/2024/10/05/why-france-
| repat...
|
| These articles all have the flavour of the game of telephone
| common in this style of article where the currency that the
| gain is in changes wording, the motivation seems to shift,
| and phrasing lacks real detail instead relying on 'upgrading'
| and 'refining'.
|
| I wish there were a good LLM agent that were capable of
| tracing all this back to the real original source that
| spawned all these things, but the information environment is
| currently full of smoke and getting real news is quite hard.
|
| I can't realistically conclude whether this was politically
| motivated or not. The original motivation is sufficiently
| strong on its own, but it is completely normal for
| governments to move something to be earlier, or to do a
| marginal thing if there is other gain.
| ljlolel wrote:
| Ground news?
| atombender wrote:
| They started the process in 2005 [1]. The goal has been to
| upgrade all their goal to modern purity standards (99.999%
| purity). The repatriation to France may have been done for
| national security reasons, but not political as in
| ideological.
|
| [1] https://www.banque-
| france.fr/fr/actualites/resultats-2025-de...
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Unless one reads between the lines.
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| And winning athletes and sports teams don't go to the white
| house due to 'scheduling conflicts'. And Amazon paid $75m for a
| Melania documentary because they saw real profit and need
| there. And Qatar bought Trump an airplane because it was
| important for his work. And everyone nominates him for a nobel
| prize because he ends wars and doesn't get into wars (we're
| just in a special military operation atm).
| seydor wrote:
| Of course not . absolutely definitely nothing to do with the
| mad king (who is great and handsome)
| mort96 wrote:
| Would it count as a "political reason" if their risk management
| calculations crossed a threshold where it's worth it to move
| the gold back? I imagine such calculations are done and revised
| all the time and account for the perceived stability and
| reliability of a country.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Russia's frozen assets probably were considered safe by the
| similar calculations. Everything is safe until it is not.
| gostsamo wrote:
| The gas supply from Russia was announced as secure* until
| it was not.
|
| * mainly by Russia and people on their payroll that is.
| mort96 wrote:
| I don't understand what point you are making.
| fenykep wrote:
| Site doesn't load for me. https://archive.is/ePH8u
| rstarast wrote:
| This seems to be the source article (Reuters, March 24):
| https://www.reuters.com/business/french-central-bank-books-1...
| cladopa wrote:
| This is not gain at all. At least in theory: You own some tons of
| gold at the start of the process, you have the same tons of gold
| at the end of the process.
|
| The only real gain is that you have gold in the US custody and
| the US can be tempted to just use it without telling you
| anything.
|
| In other words, you had "paper gold" or "virtual gold" that the
| US can confiscate anytime, for example after invading Greenland,
| blackmailing France to do nothing.
|
| You gain custody of what is yours.
| 0dayman wrote:
| which can be the difference between losing that entire amount
| or gaining it, and in this situation with this America, this is
| a big win if they manage to get it back in fact, if it hasn't
| been stolen or sold already
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| From the full press release:
|
| "In 2025 and at the start of 2026, while the volume of gold
| reserves remained unchanged, the Banque de France had to align
| a residual portion (5%) with technical guidelines, resulting in
| a significant realised currency gain. This exceptional foreign
| exchange income totalled EUR 11 billion for 2025."
|
| -- the keyword here likely being "realized"
| mort96 wrote:
| Is the logic that it's "unrealised" while the gold is stored
| in the US but becomes "realised" once it is stored in Paris?
| Why?
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| You bought it once at X price, it's realized when you sell
| it, it's unrealized while "open"
|
| If they held it for 100 years and finally sold it, then
| profit/loss is realized now
| mort96 wrote:
| But then they bought it again. They had 129 tons of gold,
| and now they still have 129 tons of gold. Where does the
| realised gains come from?
| emanueleo wrote:
| They "realized" it just for a short time.
| fakedang wrote:
| The variation in gold prices in the time they carried out
| this exchange process.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| So they had 129 tons of gold, and now they have 129 tons
| of gold and 11 billions of euros? Sounds like a good deal
| if so.
|
| Edit: wtf is going on with you for downvoting a
| question...
| 6031769 wrote:
| Welcome to the wonderful world of commodities trading.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| They had gold worth X to the market but X minus 11
| billion on paper. So when France accounted for its gold
| in euro terms they would say they have X minus 11 billion
| Euros worth of gold.
|
| Now they still have the same amount of gold but they
| "realized" a gain of 11 billion. They don't have that
| much cash left after the repurchase but now they say they
| have X Euros worth of gold which is 11 billion more than
| before.
|
| So no they didn't make a profit from this as gold is
| higher on both sides of the Atlantic than last time they
| did their accounting updates.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > worth X to the market but X minus 11 billion on paper.
|
| Why was it worth "X minus 11 billions"?
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Probably based on the price they paid for it or when they
| last did some kind of asset accounting to calculate the
| Euro value of all assets held
| direwolf20 wrote:
| From paper shenanigans. Don't expect accounting
| spreadsheets to perfectly mirror real life. Most of the
| financial economy is kayfabe.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Let's say I bought a 100-ounce gold bar in 1965, when
| gold was $35/oz, for a total price of $3500. Let's say I
| sold it today at $4700/oz, for a total price of $470,000.
| That gives me a gain of $466,500.
|
| And let's say that I regret it. I decide that I really
| want to hold some gold, so I take the $470,000 and buy
| another 100-ounce gold bar.
|
| The situation was that I had a gold bar worth $470,000
| with a taxable basis of $3500. Now the situation is that
| I have a gold bar worth $470,000 with a taxable basis of
| $470,000, and I owe the IRS taxes on $466,500 of capital
| gains.
|
| TL;DR: Selling and re-buying the same asset gives you the
| accumulated gains, and resets the price basis.
| cloudbonsai wrote:
| Bank of France "transported" their reserve by selling the
| gold held in New York, and subsequently buying the same
| amount in European market.
|
| They opted to do so because it's just more efficient. It
| takes a lot of efforts to physically move 129 tonnes of
| gold after all. And as a side effect of this relocation
| project, they ended up recording a capital gain. It's
| nothing-burger.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The transport would likely be quite expensive as well.
| Lots of armed people needed to move gold around, plus
| special vehicles.
| tonfa wrote:
| For context, in 2025H1, 480 tons where moved from CH to
| the US (I assume originating from UK after being recast).
|
| My guess is that the choice to sell rather than transport
| was also due to using the (at the time) price divergence
| between US and European markets. (arbitrage + not having
| to pay transport + refining)
| tonfa wrote:
| It's just accounting terms. They have to show it in their
| annual reports (afaiu they have to take into accounts
| unrealized losses, and realized gains, it's the case for
| many companies as well -- eg it came up with some Bitcoin
| treasury companies).
| raincole wrote:
| If you buy $100,000 of RAM and just hoard them, and a
| shortage happens, you won't update their value according to
| their market price, until you sell them.
|
| That's it. It has nothing to do with whether your RAM is
| stored in New York or Paris.
| H8crilA wrote:
| You treat your brokerage account this way? I'm sure that
| the retirement funds don't.
| raincole wrote:
| If you're a retail business that sells RAM then yes, this
| is the way.
|
| If you're a fund that holds RAM in some indirect manner
| (like you hold hypothetical RAM futures) then it depends
| on whether your country's laws ask for market-to-market
| value for that specific kind of security.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| France didn't pay taxes on the gold, so it didn't keep it
| "on the books" at decades-old prices. It tracked the
| real-time value.
|
| However, that doesn't mean there isn't profit possible,
| even over a supposedly super-liquid asset like gold.
| seanhunter wrote:
| No. Firstly the gain is to a certain extent a matter of
| accounting. The most accurate method of accounting is "mark
| to market". So if you have some gold and you think in
| dollars, then every day you look at how much gold you have
| and you look at the price of gold in dollars, you multiply
| the two and the difference between that value and the value
| you got to the previous day is your "mark to market
| pnl".[1] This means you have a very accurate valuation for
| your asset but the downside of this approach is that your
| pnl is very volatile as the gold price moves around. This
| is the approach taken for most assets by most wall st
| firms. In fact at JPMC and Goldman it's not stretching a
| point too far to say mark to market is nearly a religion.
| In this methodology there is no such thing as "unrealised"
| pnl.
|
| Another approach is "historical cost" or "cost basis"
| accounting. In this approach you officially hold assets at
| the price you bought them, and only realise pnl when you
| dispose of them. This means you don't get pnl volatility
| from marking to market and then you get a big lump of pnl
| when you sell.[2] Until you sell or otherwise crystalize
| the pnl, the profit is "unrealised", which is just an
| imaginary amount that you may or may not get but you look
| at in your brokerage statement and smile if it's green or
| frown if it's red. The advantage of this method is you
| don't get the pnl volatility and you can wait until an
| advantageous moment to take the profits. The downside is if
| you want to, you can deceive yourself by holding these
| assets at a valuation that is unrealistic and store up pnl
| pain for the future. This methodology caused a lot of
| problems in the 2008 crisis with institutions holding bonds
| at prices that they could never hope to sell them.[3]
|
| "Moving" the gold from NYC to Paris may not (for practical
| reasons) have involved actually physically taking the bars
| from one place to another. They may have found a buyer in
| NYC and then bought some bars on the IME in London and had
| them delivered to Paris. (This would clearly have required
| crystalizing the profit if they were holding them at
| historical cost). It sounds from a brief read of the
| article as if the bars were in some non-standard format so
| they may have had them melted down and recast, which would
| have required an assay and so would have triggered a new
| valuation, realising the profit. Assuming they were holding
| them at historical cost, which it sounds like they were.
|
| [1] Technically, if you sell some gold during the day, then
| the pnl on the portion you sold is "trading pnl" and the
| pnl on the remainder is "mark to market" but whatever. It's
| pretty much the same for the French reserve bank which has
| gold and thinks in EUR, except they not only have gold MTM
| pnl but also FX pnl in the EUR/USD rate (because gold
| prices in USD but they think in EUR).
|
| [2] Or do some other event which requires valuation. There
| are rules about this kind of thing.
|
| [3] When Lehman collapsed they had bonds marked at 100 that
| were trading at less than 40 cents. One weekend I'll never
| forget I got a call from a very senior partner and was
| asked to value the European part of that portfolio as part
| of the US regulators frantic attempts to find a buyer for
| Lehman before the market opened.
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's more of a loss for the USA, which IMO is the unwritten
| point of the article.
|
| France upgraded their gold bars to a new standard and as they
| were doing that, gold has appreciated massively in price, so
| France has the new shiny easier to trade bars, and the USA has
| the old harder to trade bars.
| tux3 wrote:
| They can be melted and brought to the modern standard, which
| is what they did with the rest of their holdings on the old
| continent. They sold these only because it was cheaper than
| transporting it.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I doubt recasting them is cheap?
| coldtea wrote:
| As @somenameforme wrote:
|
| [] they sold their 'non-standard' (seems to be bars below the
| modern purity standards) US reserves, and replaced them with
| new reserves purchased elsewhere which are now stored in
| France. As the price of gold continued to rise as they did
| this, they ended up making a bunch of dinero while also
| centralizing their reserves.
|
| sounds like a gain to me.
| mort96 wrote:
| A gain of $15b? That's roughly the value of 100 metric tons
| of gold, remarkably close to the 129 tons that the article
| says was moved... did they double the value of their gold?
| mhluongo wrote:
| When something is "realized" is a matter of accounting. It
| means to make the change, they sold the gold fo currrency,
| then bought it back. For many of us, realizing a gain is
| when taxes happen, though I'm not sure what it means for a
| nation state.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/realizedprofit.asp
| mort96 wrote:
| So they could sell it again and buy it again and realise
| another $15b?
| atombender wrote:
| No, there wouldn't be any gains to realize -- unless the
| gold price went up since they bought it, of course.
|
| If you buy something for $10 and sell at $15, you
| realized a gain of $5. If you then buy at $15 and sell it
| at $15, you realized a gain of $0.
| coldtea wrote:
| That's an orthogonal matter (if the gain/loss was
| calculated correctly).
|
| But they didn't just move gold bars around, is my point,
| and in what they did (sold, rebuy) there indeed was an
| opportunity to make a gain.
| michaelt wrote:
| Assets like this are one of the complexities in calculating
| national import and export figures.
|
| For example, imagine there's some German-owned gold in a UK
| bank vault, the owners sell it to a UK broker who sells it to a
| Chinese investor? The physical bars don't move, but on paper
| it's been imported to the UK then exported.
|
| But a lot of people looking at export figures are expecting to
| learn things about the manufacturing industry, and picturing
| exports as washing machines, cars and computer chips - which
| imply lots of well paid jobs for skilled labour. So the UK
| reports import/export figures with 'non-monetary gold' listed
| separately.
|
| (The fact flows of gold are highly volatile allows a classic
| bit of political sleight-of-hand - if you include gold, UK
| exports are both up and down since Brexit, depending on the
| pair of dates you choose)
| daneel_w wrote:
| Paper/virtual gold perhaps bought ages ago at a far lower price
| point, now turned into real, solid gold in parity with today's
| price point. To me this sounds like the implied gain.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| If it were that simple, the gain would be much more. Gold
| sold at $35/troy ounce then; over $4000 now.
|
| EDIT: Wow, gold prices!
| echelon_musk wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659007
| Rexxar wrote:
| It's probably just a technical accounting update. Old assets
| are often kept valued at their buy price and not reevaluated
| every year to avoid taxes (Banque de France is not exempt from
| taxes). As they swap a type of gold by another and do a
| sell/buy action, the new gold is valued to current market price
| while the old one was valued in accounting at an old value.
|
| They had a deficit last year, so they can probably avoid to pay
| tax this year by balancing last year loss with this year
| profit.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > This is not gain at all. At least in theory: You own some
| tons of gold at the start of the process, you have the same
| tons of gold at the end of the process.
|
| Correct. A better way to put it is you shorted the USD. Which
| is a smart move at any rate. So a gain indeed.
| w4yai wrote:
| u mad bro ?
| _heimdall wrote:
| The concept of "paper" assets isn't specifically about whether
| you hold physical custody of the asset, its whether the asset
| exists at all.
|
| If the US holds 100 tons of gold on behalf of another country
| and possesses that full amount, it isn't paper gold.
|
| Derivatives are where paper assets come into play. You buy the
| right to own 100 tons, for example, and whoever owes you that
| either owns only a fraction of their total liability or plans
| to buy it when delivery is requested. That's an over
| simplification of a much more complex market, but the key is
| that "paper gold" owed doesn't exist in the full amount.
| BrtByte wrote:
| The article isn't saying they magically created value out of
| nowhere
| Galanwe wrote:
| > This is not gain at all. At least in theory: You own some
| tons of gold at the start of the process, you have the same
| tons of gold at the end of the process.
|
| I see a lot of comments like this but I just can't get my head
| around what you are trying to prove (or disprove).
|
| Every definition of gain (or loss for that matter) implies that
| the same amount of _something_ is now worth more (or less) than
| when you bought it.
|
| Following you logic, if I buy a share of MSFT at $10, sell it
| for $100, there is no gain because I still have 1 share of
| MSFT?
| conorcleary wrote:
| but you sold it...
|
| (I know share rehypothication exists, but it shouldn't)
| Galanwe wrote:
| Even if you rebuy it at $100 it's the same, your profit
| didn't change, you just exchanged cash for an asset.
|
| Before you sold it you had unrealized gains, after you sold
| it you had realized gains, after you bought it again you
| have the same gains but materialized as shares.
| stephbook wrote:
| > The only real gain is that you have gold in the US custody
| and the US can be tempted to just use it without telling you
| anything.
|
| What if you're at war, you can't risk to get your gold out and
| the US doesn't sell you anything because.. you can't pay?
|
| If your solution is to "write France's debt on a piece of paper
| and hope they honor it", I've got some news to tell you about
| the system you just "invented."
| tonfa wrote:
| On that topic, video about the underground vault:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txyKenOq5Pw
| dbdr wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this little hidden gem!
| wolvoleo wrote:
| We in Holland should do the same but our government (especially
| the right wing VVD) adores the US so they never bothered :(
| Avalaxy wrote:
| The netherlands as a whole should do this. Not just holland.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Oh yes that's what I mean. I don't like calling it the
| Netherlands.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Oh yes that's what I mean. I don't like calling it the
| Netherlands.
|
| it was tongue-in-cheek dude.
|
| literal people are a hoot.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| True everyone loves hooters :3
| ezst wrote:
| Why not?
| ezequiel-garzon wrote:
| I'm curious about this too. I thought saying "we in
| Holland" was equivalent to "we in England" rather than
| "we in the UK". Is it acceptable in the Netherlands? (Or
| maybe just in Holland proper?)
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Oh there's just some stupid 'rebranding' going on.
| https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-
| elsewhere-49921029
|
| As I hate our government I don't play by their rules.
|
| Besides, Holland is shorter and easier to pronounce.
| racl101 wrote:
| I kid you not one time I saw the Netherlands spelled as:
| The 'Neanderthals' . I had such a good laugh. Almost
| choked on my coffee.
| ezst wrote:
| I obviously don't have a horse in this race, but this
| seems... more correct this way? And with Holland being a
| region (or two) and not the majority of the territory,
| how do the Dutch not living in Holland feel about it? It
| would seem like referring to Canada as "Quebec", way to
| piss-off the non quebecers...
| racl101 wrote:
| I just called them the Dutches. lol
| codethief wrote:
| Is anyone here actually reading the article? Yes, they really
| made a gain of $15B:
|
| > But instead of refining and transporting the gold, it opted to
| sell the bars and purchase new bullion in Europe. [...] Due to
| rising gold prices, the move helped the bank to generate a
| capital gain of 13 billion euros ($15 billion),
| mort96 wrote:
| This doesn't make sense. If they first sold the bars held in
| the US, then the gold prices rose, then they bought gold in
| Europe, how the hell did that amount to a capital gain of $15b?
| How exactly do prices rising over the course of the process
| lead to these $15b?
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Gold is down 10+% since its recent peak. They likely sold
| then and repurchased later.
| mort96 wrote:
| Then they made money thanks to gold prices fluctuating, not
| thanks to gold prices rising?
|
| And how does a 10% market shift lead to gaining $15b,
| roughly the value of 100 tons of gold, from the sale and
| re-purchase of 129 tons of gold?
|
| This math ain't mathing.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Other costs? Deviations in the actual figures from the
| estimates we're using here? 100 is not a million miles
| away from 129.
| defrost wrote:
| It's more that the english ain't parsing, for some at
| least.
|
| The mining.com quote is classic weasel phrasing,
| seemingly meaningful yet disturbingly ambiguous:
| Due to rising gold prices, the move helped the bank to
| generate a capital gain of 13 billion euros ($15
| billion), bringing it to a net profit of 8.1 billion
| euros for the 2025 financial year after a net loss of 7.7
| billion euros in 2024.
|
| So, the move _helped_ the bank generate ...
|
| Just as, say, one guy helped four others push a car back
| up on the road.
|
| We've been given, accurately or not .. likely true,
| figures on how the bank did over a period, we've also
| been told the gold movements helped with that ... so they
| almost certainly kicked in at least $1.
| samus wrote:
| Dumpling $15B on the market should lead to a drop. Anyway,
| the gold price is not always going up.
| mort96 wrote:
| The claim is that rising gold prices lead to gains of $15b.
| As in they started with 129 tons of gold in the US, then
| they sold that and bought gold in Europe, and in the end,
| due to rising gold prices, they had 129 tons of gold in
| Paris plus $15b extra cash. Please explain a hypothetical
| course of events which makes this plausible.
|
| Keep in mind that 129 tons of gold is worth just a bit more
| than $15b, so small market fluctuations on the scale of 10%
| isn't enough by itself.
| sumanthvepa wrote:
| They purchased 129 tons of gold in Europe. Their asset
| position did not change: they converted cash to gold of
| the same value.
|
| They then sold the 129 tons gold in the US vaults for $16
| billion. That gold was originally purchased I'm guessing
| many decades ago for $1 billion. The have a book profit
| of $15 billion and still have 129 tons of gold.
|
| They captured some of the appreciation in gold value as a
| realised profit on their books.
|
| Their balance sheet did not change, just their income
| statement
| samus wrote:
| Very succinctly stated, thank you!
| codethief wrote:
| First thought: Maybe they bought the gold first? Or the gold
| price was at a temporary high when they sold it?
|
| Second thought: The numbers don't seem to check out: 129t are
| 4,147,456.307 troy ounces (1 troy ounce = 31.1034768 g). The
| total gains of 15e9 USD would thus correspond to gains of
| $3,616.68 per troy ounce, which seems excessively high, given
| that today's gold price is at ~$4,712. Even if they sold
| everything at the current all-time high of $5,589.38 on
| January 28 (and that's a big if), they would have had to buy
| for not more than $1,972.70, a price we last had in fall
| 2023.
|
| They must have had an exceptional crystal ball!
| FabHK wrote:
| Unless their cost base was around $1000 per troy ounce or
| less, as it was before 2010.
| amelius wrote:
| Gold prices probably went up due to turmoil in middle east.
| erikerikson wrote:
| Imagine they bought the gold in the US for 1b and sold for
| 16b. Yes they turned around and purchased 16b of order gold
| immediately but there's was still a transaction where they
| sold an asset for more than they bought it.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| If you bought your house for $500k 20 years ago, sold it
| today for a million, then bought it again tomorrow for a
| million, would you describe that to your friends as having
| just made $500k? Like yes in the most pedantic technical
| accounting way it's a gain. In spirit I would call this an
| unrealized gain
| erikerikson wrote:
| No but I read the article and that was the way it
| described the gain.
| throwaway34903 wrote:
| Sure in the spirit it's an unrealized gain but wouldn't
| the tax man consider it a realized $500K capital gain?
| seemingly this is would be the more appropriate way of
| categorizing it?
| plaidfuji wrote:
| No, you'd remark that your house has appreciated in value
| over the past 20 years. But you wouldn't have realized
| any of that gain until you sold the house - the point
| being that the realization is the actual taxable event,
| which is why it matters from the pedantic technical
| accounting POV. The fact that you turned around and
| bought another house just means you're doing something
| new with your realized gains. Now you have a new cost
| basis. Maybe that's what you're saying with "unrealized
| gain" though.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Did they buy before selling? Otherwise that doesn't make sense.
| lljk_kennedy wrote:
| Sell at high, buy at low?
| samus wrote:
| The gold price is fluctuating. It doesn't always go up.
| worldvoyageur wrote:
| The US gold would have been on the books at the original
| purchase price, so something like US$35 from 1910 (when a penny
| had a purchasing power of 38 cents now). Having deemed it more
| efficient to sell that gold and buy the same amount to replace
| it, the new gold is on the books at the 2026 purchase price. As
| the 2026 money price is far higher than the 1910 price, the
| value on the books shows a dramatic realized capital gain.
|
| No gain would have shown for the gold that was simply moved,
| even though in this case the buying and selling was simply a
| more efficient way of doing the equivalent of moving the gold.
|
| Gold that was simply moved wouldn't show the same gain.
| codethief wrote:
| That makes more sense, thank you! Though do gold assets on
| the books really never get adjusted? I guess that's up the
| central bank to decide but I would find it surprising.
| worldvoyageur wrote:
| It's the rules of how they must account for the value of
| the gold they have. Gold is valued at the price paid. Then,
| it is valued at the price sold. If there is no sale for
| more than a century, it stays on the books at the price
| paid. Once a transaction happens, the numbers update. Then,
| the gain that everyone knows is there is 'realized'. It's
| like if you mined Bitcoin in the early days. Your gain is
| only 'realized' when you actually sell it. Until then, it
| is only theoretical.
|
| Mark-to-market accounting systems are one way to deal with
| this quirk, but they create their own issues.
| codethief wrote:
| What I was trying to get at is that there are other ways
| to update asset valuations besides daily (market-to-
| market) and once (price paid) - those are just the
| extreme ends of a spectrum. What makes sense really
| depends on the asset class and how long you're holding
| the positions. As for "It's the rules", I'm aware that
| there are strict accounting rules for companies and
| regular banks, but do those really apply to the central
| bank in the exact same way? (A central bank typically
| operates on a much longer time scales.)
| IAmBroom wrote:
| If the central bank doesn't follow rules, who would trust
| it? The central bank's entire purpose is to put national
| trust into individual banks; both assuring investments
| (accounts) and establishing base (prime) loan rates.
|
| A central bank answers directly to the government, not
| the judiciary. But it still answers to power, and follows
| established rules.
| codethief wrote:
| I'm not saying it shouldn't follow rules, I said the
| rules might be _different_.
|
| A balance sheet becomes pointless if some assets are
| valued at today's prices, while other assets are valued
| at their price from 100 years ago.
| omcnoe wrote:
| Mark to market versus mark to book accounting for central
| bank gold reserves is an endless source of crank adjacent
| debates.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Is that what led to gold price falling?
| FabHK wrote:
| [delayed]
| Finnucane wrote:
| Actually reading the comments first because the page isn't
| loading for me.
| BrtByte wrote:
| I think the confusion is that both statements can be true
| depending on what you mean by "gain"
| navigate8310 wrote:
| You sell in country A and buy the *same quantity* in country B.
| You were just lucky that the gold you bought a century ago was
| rocketing to Mars.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Germany also needs to pull all gold. We have 1236t there.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Would be good to not depend on the US that much any longer,
| since they have proven to be such an unreliable "partner". Even
| in a non-Trump future one cannot rely upon some future election
| not resulting in some similar disaster. Better to pull out,
| before some hothead gets weird ideas about that gold.
| vasco wrote:
| Maybe the fact that US soldiers and military bases exist
| inside Germany's borders is slightly more important than
| where the gold is. First regain your sovereignty, I'd say.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I am guessing that these bases are one of the last things
| to go. Would be a major diplomatic incident. But then again
| Trump creates those for breakfast, so who knows when we
| finally have had enough.
| samus wrote:
| The USA is threatening to pull out of NATO anyway, so those
| might go away.
| praptak wrote:
| Nothing wrong with going for the low hanging fruit first.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Yes, close Ramstein and close Landstuhl, which were used
| for every US war in the Middle East in the last 30 years.
| Havoc wrote:
| With the way the US is going that might just end up in a gold
| trump statue instead
| inglor_cz wrote:
| But that statue would rotate to face the sun!
|
| If Turkmenistan can have it, why not the US?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_Monument
|
| (Though it no longer rotates.)
| sschueller wrote:
| There was that whole spiel of Elon and Trump going to Fort Knox
| to see if the gold was still there, What ever happened to that?
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Trump thought or heard mention of Minchin
| (first Trump Treasury Secretary) visit to Fort Knox in 2017
| recent to that comment and just blurted out the first thing
| that came to his mind - like most of his off the cuff
| remarks, it doesn't make any sense on close examination but
| appeals to MAGA supporters.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| The doesn't answer the question.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Like most off the cuff Trump remarks - it made headlines
| for a while but _nothing_ came of it, it's not in Project
| 2025 and Musk fell out of favor with Trump for whatever
| reason. The combo of Musk and Trump was just dry kindling
| for the forest fire of baseless conspiracy theories with
| no founding in reality - like "omg, government
| incompetence lost the gold, Biden stole the gold after
| Trump didn't lose in 2020" since Minchin told Trump what
| he saw in 2017 and Minchin posted interior photos of Knox
| with his wife at the time on social media. Since it
| disappeared from news after the remark and there is no
| one in current Trump admin who would pass up an
| opportunity for internet karma, a reasonable person can
| conclude it was just another bit of flooding the zone
| with information - credit where credit is due - several
| strategies executed by Trump that were outlined in
| Jacques Ellul seminal book - Propaganda.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Germany also needs to pull all gold. We have 1236t there.
|
| They had better act fast, before an executive order prevents
| that from ever happening.
| okanat wrote:
| US also has gold reserves and investments in Germany. They
| can be seized.
| fasdfplasjk5425 wrote:
| Looks like we're at the beginning of
|
| FBRICS
| praptak wrote:
| EUBRICS, but it also includes Canada but not Russia and it's
| really more like "sane countries readjusting their politics
| against a mad ape".
| shevy-java wrote:
| Considering how Project2025 declared Europeans as enemy, it
| really is time to focus on more reliable partners than the
| current (and most likely future) USA version. Trump is a war-
| president - when he babbles about what Project2025 tells him to
| say, he stumbles over his own lies increasingly so, most likely
| because his brain no longer works that well. The recent "we can
| not extend health care and social care because we must wage wars"
| was kind of a slip-up of the real agenda - not that this is a
| real secret either, but even folks who voted for Trump thinking
| he cares about him (as if billionaires care about other people
| ever), should now realise the path the USA has decided to walk.
| ICE shooting down US citizens also show this - you protest, you
| get shot.
| enoint wrote:
| It has more to do with Putin than any of that. Trump says he
| and Putin "went through a hell of a lot" together. Values
| inverted at last year's Munich security conference, and the US
| advised Europe to just lay back and take it. Then, Greenland.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| At least they got their gold this time.
|
| The last time they asked for their gold back Nixon "temporarily"
| ended the convertibility of the USD to gold.
| kccqzy wrote:
| It's exactly the opposite. Last time France was trying to
| exchange USD to gold. This time France was selling gold
| presumably exchanging gold to USD in New York.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| I doubt the claim, honestly. Such an institution would never buy
| and sell to trade the market, they probably never stopped being
| exposed to gold by buying and selling simultaneously and the 15b
| is the realized gain of the sold gold, which is only in paper as
| they still hold the gold.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Such an institution would never buy and sell to trade the
| market
|
| This is not what they're doing.
|
| They're just re-asserting their sovereignty over their
| property, a smart move in the current geopolitical climate.
|
| I'm actually surprised the utter dumbass they have at the helm
| over there managed to cook up such a smart move.
| u1hcw9nx wrote:
| >However, an operation to repatriate its gold holdings began in
| the 1960s leading up to the US termination of the Bretton Woods
| system, which effectively stopped foreign governments from
| exchanging dollars for gold.
|
| French-US monetary history after WWII:
|
| Under the Bretton Woods agreement (1944-1971), the US dollar was
| the world's reserve currency, and it was pegged to gold at $35
| per ounce. Other countries pegged their currencies to the dollar.
|
| around 1965, De Gaulle initiated a systematic, aggressive policy
| where they converted USD into physical gold every time French
| acquired USD from trade, then French Navy picked those gold
| bullions from NY. By 1971, the US gold reserves had decreased so
| much that they did not cover the dollars circulating globally and
| Nixon "closed the gold window,"
| hypeatei wrote:
| De Gaulle was ahead of his time. He was very skeptical of the
| control that the US had over Europe through NATO. He left the
| alliance to build an independent French nuclear program which
| is paying dividends today amid the current leadership situation
| in the US.
| c7b wrote:
| He also called Brexit before the UK had even joined.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I think that is the part that the parent is referring to.
| corford wrote:
| IIRC, De Gaulle & Churchill proposed a UK-FR union at one
| point (1940?) but it didn't get sufficient support within
| the French government. Interesting to ponder what the war
| and later EU trajectories might have looked like if that
| had happened.
| philistine wrote:
| That union was a last ditch effort to try and keep France
| in the war. If they had implemented it, it would have
| been undone once the nazis were beaten you can be sure.
| thmsths wrote:
| From my recollection, the plan was to grant French
| citizenship to every British citizen and vice versa, in
| effect "forcing" the governments to defend their citizens
| to the end. This was very ambitious, hence why it
| probably did not happen. But if it had happen, I have a
| hard time seeing how it could be undone, stripping people
| of their citizenship, even if they have a second one is
| no trivial matter.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| It was suggested again in 1956 in the context of the Suez
| crisis:
|
| http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6261885.stm
| weitendorf wrote:
| That was also a last-ditch effort to maintain pre-WW2
| geopolitical structures rather than a bipolar US-sphere
| vs Soviet-sphere world. Note that this was basically the
| nail in the coffin that led to their full-fledged
| decolonization in the following years. At the time the UK
| still held very significant military and political sway
| over the middle east, east africa, and asia
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire#/media/File:
| Bri...
| byroot wrote:
| Nitpick, but France never left NATO proper, only the
| integrated command, and reintegrated it in 2008 under
| Sarkozy.
| simgt wrote:
| Sarkozy, who renamed what descended from De Gaulle's party
| into "Les Republicains" because of his obsession for the
| US. Who also got sponsored by Gaddafi, and invited him to
| pitch his tent in the Elysee's garden. And who ten years
| ago was still spewing climate change denial crap. He
| probably still would, but he's too busy talking about how
| his 10 days in prison was the most atrocious experience a
| human being had to endure.
|
| Funny how much his pathetic 5 years in office keep on
| giving.
| throw0101c wrote:
| Certainly debatable.
|
| De Gaulle started this 'policy' in 1965 and it's mainly the
| current leadership situation that's been a problem--60 years
| later. So to a certain extent the policy in question was
| 'wrong' for decades. How "right" can you really consider them
| when it was a problem year after year, decade after decade:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny
|
| It reminds me of the folks that keep saying there will be a
| major crash on Wall Street year after year after year... and
| then it just happens to be occur.
|
| * https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/12/rich-author-poor-
| re...
| c7b wrote:
| In what sense was the policy wrong? Emphasizing
| independence when it comes to security doesn't strike me as
| self-evidently wrong. Curious to hear your arguments. "They
| were very happy about it 60 years later" alone isn't
| evidence of it being wrong.
| dkga wrote:
| I disagree. It was a right policy in the sense that it
| bought France an insurance policy that essentially no other
| Western country has. Like all insurance policies, you hope
| to be wrong, but when the time comes, you are protected
| from some of the worse case scenarios.
| throw0101c wrote:
| Yes, this is the debatable part: the policy is "wrong"
| for 60 years and extracted a cost to France over those
| years (at least when it came to nuclear weapons?).
|
| There _just happened_ to be a whacko that got into the
| White House, but if ~70k (out of >100M) had gone the
| other way in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have won and the
| world would be a different place. (See also ~500 votes in
| Bush versus Gore.)
|
| I'd be curious to know the 'insurance premium' that was
| paid by France every year and the total.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| > There just happened to be a whacko that got into the
| White House
|
| My counter to this is that such an occurrence was
| increasingly likely starting around the time the massive
| US Evangelical base was essentially fully captured by
| (and became a wing of) the Republican party. It was more
| and more obvious over a period of at least 40 of those 60
| years you mention.
| wat10000 wrote:
| If you prepare for a crash to happen on September 23rd,
| you're a fool. You can't point to a crash that happens a
| year later and say you got it right.
|
| But if you prepare for a crash to happen at some point,
| that's just good sense. Only a fool would think that there
| would never be a crash. If you arrange your finances to
| withstand a crash, and there's eventually a crash, then
| that was the right thing to do even if it took a long time.
|
| Ensuring the independence of your nation is more of the
| second kind. And it pays off even when there isn't an
| outright crisis. The policy wasn't "wrong" for decades. It
| was fine the whole time.
| dboreham wrote:
| Time to make the "De Gaulle was Right about everything"
| baseball cap.
| kergonath wrote:
| Let's not get carried away. He was also wrong about many
| things. He was a good strategist, which was useful during
| WWII and helped France massively in the post-war years. His
| domestic policies were very much a mixed bag. He was not
| exactly authoritarian, but built himself a strong
| presidential political system. Which would have been fine
| if he had been right all the time, but he was not.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Or a "De Gaulle Apology Form":
|
| https://i.redd.it/opw3zv6x4qke1.png
| doe88 wrote:
| > to build an independent French nuclear program
|
| For which France was helped by the UK, so it certainly would
| make sense if France helped the europe and uk to build its
| own nuclear deterrence.
| aubanel wrote:
| That was a cooperation, both sides benefitted. So there's
| no debt to repay.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| France is currently contacting selected partners to build a
| collective nuclear weapon coalition, probably focusing on
| Norway due to their location and recent oil wealth. Given
| recent events, reasonable people may disagree strongly on the
| directions that is leading.
| moffkalast wrote:
| De Gaulle of this man.
| iamsomewalrus wrote:
| Underrated comment
| ur-whale wrote:
| > De Gaulle initiated a systematic, aggressive policy where
| they converted USD into physical gold
|
| The dude was a visionary for many things, but I didn't know
| about this. Borderline prescient. What a guy.
| okanat wrote:
| Just like the majority of the classical economists and
| policymakers, you would call him a blithering idiot and
| overzealous nationalist two decades ago. It was thought that
| this kind of behavior caused world-wars. I mean it did cause
| them. It is just we're speed running the next one that
| changed the narrative.
| Iulioh wrote:
| This behavior is economically inefficient, that's why it's
| criticized. And it's undeniable
|
| But the point is that "economical efficiency" is not the
| only metric that matters, stability and power do not come
| cheap.
| ivell wrote:
| I think many academics are often specialized in one area
| of their expertise and overfit in that dimension.
| Journalists pick this up and promote those views a bit
| too much. This results in non-optimal decisions due to
| skewed public perceptions.
|
| We need to promote holistic thinking considering multiple
| dimensions and not just one where academics are
| proficient in.
| Iulioh wrote:
| The problem is that there isn't simply an efficient
| solution for everything. At one point every problem has
| solutions with pros and cons
|
| France could do it as it is a rich and big country but
| smaller countries do not have a viable choice. This
| reasoning could have been applied to France too in
| another universe.
|
| It's a balance impossible to totally tilt one way or
| another.
|
| So no amount of extra information could help when it's
| matter of opinion at the end of the day
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _many academics are often specialized in one area of
| their expertise and overfit in that dimension_
|
| An economist saying a national-security measure costs
| this much is fine. Where it goes off the rails is in
| turning costs into damnation without accounting for what
| one gets in return. In an attention-driven media
| environment, that sells.
| expedition32 wrote:
| De Gaulle was not an overzealous nationalist. He actually
| ended French colonialism and started an alliance with
| Germany.
|
| He was a patriot and very pragmatic. He knew France had
| been diminished. He had no time for delusional ideas.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > trade, then French Navy picked those gold bullions from NY
|
| I couldn't find any clear news source or academic reference to
| that event. I see a lot of references on gold buying/selling
| sites mostly. I would imagine a Fench Navy ship docked NY and
| loading tons of gold would make quite a stir.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Gold is very dense. 10 Tonnes of gold takes up less than a
| cubic meter of volume.
|
| Moving tonnes of gold doesn't look like huge pallets of gold
| with tarps over them like a James Bond movie. It looks like a
| handful of supply crates.
|
| I imagine that the French Navy visits NY ports of a regular
| basis. Pretty normal for Navy's to sail into the ports of
| allies during peace time. There would be nothing unusual
| about a French Navy vessel sailing into NY loading up with
| some supplies and leaving.
|
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10tonnes+of+gold
| rdtsc wrote:
| For a country like France it would be on the order of
| hundreds or a thousand tons. So that's maybe on the order
| of hundred trips by delivery trucks at most. Yeah I suppose
| spread out over a few years it wouldn't be noticed. At
| least not by the general public. But since the claim is
| that this triggered the collapse of the Bretton Woods
| system it would be documented and referenced a lot more,
| still.
| lazide wrote:
| Most delivery trucks (like a box truck) have capacities
| more like 10 or 20 tons. A heavy freight truck, like used
| to load ships? Even more.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Was that the case in the 60s as well? I know trucks of
| that era had much lower capacity than today, even when
| comparing across class like "half-ton" trucks.
| vel0city wrote:
| The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 set the gross vehicle
| weight limit for trucks at 73,280lbs. I imagine trucks of
| the day probably at least came close to that limit?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_trucking_ind
| ust...
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| A half-ton truck is a consumer pick-up truck, not a
| commercial shipping vehicle. Much much smaller.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Yup that's what I had in mind, a 60s city delivery truck,
| not a semi, so googled that and came up to about 10t.
| jjk166 wrote:
| The gold would be moved by cash-in-transit trucks which
| have relatively modest payload capacities of 5000-9000lbs
| today, a bit less in the 60s. 3 tons per truck is
| probably on the high end.
| therealpygon wrote:
| You don't generally just throw gold in a box truck... it
| typically moves by armored freight.
| oasisbob wrote:
| Maybe in some volumes, but I think most people would be
| shocked by the overall volume of gold that moves by UPS
| in small brown boxes.
| enoint wrote:
| https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art.
| ..
|
| Whether the exact ship was a battleship or a destroyer might
| make the search result.
| janandonly wrote:
| I can't open that link. Too bad.
| esseph wrote:
| Cloudflare DNS?
| enoint wrote:
| I think I munged the link. Anyway, the answer is in a
| search result, with some discussion about whether it was
| a battleship or destroyer.
| enoint wrote:
| https://archive.ph/ioukS
| snikeris wrote:
| https://www.helleniscope.com/2025/07/31/august-1971-the-
| day-...
|
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/august-15-1971_b_4284327
| bhouston wrote:
| > I couldn't find any clear news source or academic reference
| to that event.
|
| It happened though. Here are the sources for it:
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock#Criticism_and_dec
| l...
|
| - https://www.thegoldobserver.com/p/how-france-secretly-
| repatr...
|
| - https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/1994/128/art
| i...
| rdtsc wrote:
| What happened is the gold got repatriated. I was looking
| for a source that a French warship docked and started
| loading thousands of tons of gold.
|
| Your source confirms it as well:
|
| > Involving the French Navy was considered, but that would
| have blown the operation's cover. Instead, BdF used ocean
| liners from the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique
|
| So it was multiple trips and in commercial liners.
| rkomorn wrote:
| It's something that sounds like a plot point for a heist
| movie.
| haddr wrote:
| Check what happened to the Spanish gold before the end of
| the Spanish civil war. I think it would be even more
| dramatic movie:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Gold_(Spain)
| xethos wrote:
| Which almost might have been one of the arguments the
| Minister of Finance used to dissuade CDG
| esseph wrote:
| You should look into how often nuclear weapons are moved
| by truck.
|
| You've probably driven past more than a few.
| mrb wrote:
| As a French speaker, I looked up French sources and found
| https://www.lesechos.fr/finance-marches/banque-
| assurances/st... - here is a snippet translated to English
| below. But many more references can be found by googling
| "operation vide-gousset".
|
| 1963: Operation Empty-the-purse ("vide-gousset")
|
| It was also by warship that De Gaulle planned to conduct
| "Operation Empty-the-purse" in 1963, the code name for the
| repatriation of French gold deposited at Fort Knox in the
| United States (1). More than 1,150 tons--the result of
| converting French dollars into gold, a decision made by De
| Gaulle in response to the lax monetary policy of the United
| States--were being used to finance a growing trade deficit
| through the printing of money.
|
| Valery Giscard d'Estaing, then Minister of Finance, recounts
| (2): "De Gaulle was getting impatient and asked me at every
| meeting: 'So, has that gold finally come back?' One day, he
| told me: 'We need to move much faster: we're going to send
| the navy cruiser 'Colbert' which will bring back all the gold
| that's still there.'" "I told him that if we did that, we
| would alienate American public opinion forever." Ultimately,
| De Gaulle abandoned the Colbert plan, and French gold
| returned from the United States in small quantities. Not for
| very long, it's true. The events of May 1968 and the ensuing
| monetary crisis depleted the reserves, which fell from 4,650
| tons to 3,150 - 1,500 tons had crossed the Atlantic again to
| defend the franc, which De Gaulle refused to devalue.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Thank you, this helps and clears up my confusion. I just
| couldn't imagine this kind of an event, a warship loading
| this much gold, not triggering some media commentary, even
| mockery or criticism to defend the US establishment.
|
| > Ultimately, De Gaulle abandoned the Colbert plan, and
| French gold returned from the United States in small
| quantities.
|
| So I think the story about the warship got twisted from a
| plan or threat to "it actually happened". Doing it in small
| quantities over a few years was the right way, indeed.
| Looking back it seems like it didn't make many waves in the
| news at the time, so Giscard was absolutely right.
| kipchak wrote:
| I seem to be having more luck with French language sources,
| mostly the Bank of France records. From what I can tell the
| shipping was done mostly commercially with some later by
| air[1]. Reportedly De Gaulle was frustrated with the speed of
| change wanted to use the Colbert warship but was dissuaded by
| the minister of finance.[2]
|
| [1]https://archives-historiques.banque-
| france.fr/ark:/56433/115...
|
| [2]https://www.lesechos.fr/finance-marches/banque-
| assurances/st...
| Reason077 wrote:
| Gold is routinely transported across the Atlantic (and the
| world) by air today:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRt_Ld5vtHI
| JackFr wrote:
| One armored car can carry a ton of gold. If they left and
| drove to the closest US Navy port, where the French ship
| would dock. it wouldn't raise eyebrows.
| rdtsc wrote:
| It's just that they repatriated close to 3000 tons. That's
| one long convoy of armored cars, all going to a French
| warship docked in New York.
|
| Based on some sibling discussion it seems it just never
| happened. It was multiple shipments, over many years, going
| over commercial liners. It may have well been armored
| trucks but they just didn't all do it at once. It worked
| well that it didn't create much of a media uproar.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| Historically, if a ship carrying gold sinks, whoever salvages
| the gold/loot gets ownership of it. However, if the ship is a
| warship, the loot belongs - FOREVER - as the property of the
| nation-state (or their descendants). This has led to some
| legal battles over nautical salvage in the Atlantic (were
| those "Spanish Galleons" military or non-military? Hundreds
| of millions of dollars depends on that answer during some
| lawsuits in the 1990s) or nautical salvage in South East Asia
| where artifacts from long gone kingdoms (that didn't reflect
| borders created centuries after they collapsed) end up in
| court over what country gets to show them in museums.
|
| So yes, if you need to move national quantities of
| gold/silver across the ocean, then for legal reasons, it is
| best to ship it via _your_ navy.
| BrtByte wrote:
| From Francees perspective, they were just playing by the rules
| bombcar wrote:
| The whole of international politics is the real rules vs the
| unwritten rules.
| forshaper wrote:
| Goes for local politics as well.
| gedy wrote:
| Sounds like corporate politics too!
| mohamedkoubaa wrote:
| "closed the gold window" is a weird euphemism for "defaulted"
| flowerthoughts wrote:
| "I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further."
| kccqzy wrote:
| You seem to imply that Charles de Gaulle and his policy of
| converting dollars to gold caused the collapse of the Bretton
| Woods system. That was a myopic view. The whole Bretton Woods
| system was doomed from the beginning due to design defects.
|
| The system was conceived with the primary goal of maintaining
| balance of payments equilibrium for all countries at the
| expense of economic growth and liquidity. It had become clear
| that if a country wanted its currency to be the world reserve
| currency it had to run a balance of payment deficit. And the
| United States clearly wanted its dollar to be the reserve
| currency unbridled by any balance of payment constraints.
|
| If the United States had balance of payment surpluses as it had
| in the early years, the system lost liquidity (other countries
| wanted to buy U.S. exports but had neither gold nor dollars to
| do so), reducing the surplus. And if the United States had
| balance of payment deficits, well, gold would flow out of the
| United States, and the United States could not meaningfully
| increase public debt or spending.
| regnull wrote:
| Ok, bear with me for a moment - what if the US would use
| actual physical gold coins instead of dollars? Then your
| argument of "gold would flow out" would not hold - so the
| only reason for it to flow out was that the gold standard was
| fake - the lax money policy of the US was the issue, not the
| gold standard itself.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Ok, bear with me for a moment - what if the US would use
| actual physical gold coins instead of dollars?
|
| You'll get a bear economy, leading to the eventual
| deflation and collapse.
|
| Fun fact: it was not hyperinflation in Weimar Germany that
| led Hitler to power but _deflation_ because of its
| insistence on sticking to the gold standard.
| kr1m wrote:
| > Fun fact: it was not hyperinflation in Weimar Germany
| that led Hitler to power but _deflation_ because of its
| insistence on sticking to the gold standard.
|
| Do you have a source for this? AFAIK https://en.wikipedia
| .org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...
| cyberax wrote:
| "Hyperinflation caused Hitler" is one of the common
| narratives that "everyone knows". But German economy was
| actually growing during the hyperinflation era and by the
| time of Hitler's ascension, the hyperinflation had long
| been in the past.
|
| I personally edited this very Wikipedia article several
| times, but my changes got reverted by goldbugs who want
| to memory-hole it.
|
| This article has a nice explanation: https://www.hertie-
| school.org/fileadmin/user_upload/20191101...
|
| If you don't believe the numbers from it, they can be
| corroborated easily.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Gold is silly as a measure of value. It's just a piece of
| shiny metal. The amount of value in the world is increasing
| so you want to exchange medium to grow with it else you're
| pulling breaks on the actual economy.
| butlike wrote:
| Well it's also soft, bacteriostatic, and conductive.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| OMG, we should totally base our economic exchanges on
| copper instead!
| engineeringwoke wrote:
| Yes, it's just a shiny piece of metal. However, it is a
| pure element and there is a limited amount of it, unlike
| pretty much anything else except maybe silver.
|
| Otherwise this happens.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
|
| This is the origin of the entire white collar world and
| all of its odd bedfellows, and it will die in our
| lifetime. All of our jobs will go with it, unfortunately.
| newguy1000 wrote:
| Gold is actually really good at transferring and
| measuring value. Think about what a "good" measure of
| value would be have. It needs to last over time, not
| corrode or dissolve to the forces. It needs to be
| distributable, Divisible.. to be ubiquitous. Hard to
| create/refine, hard to find, so supply can't easily be
| inflated. It doesn't matter what the object that is being
| used for exchange of value or holding value, that's why
| you can trade and barter random objects. But if you
| condensate down the properties that make a GOOD money,
| then gold is more than just a shiny metal. "The amount of
| value in the world is increasing so you want to exchange
| medium to grow with it.." we find more gold every day, so
| there is an easing already happening naturally. And even
| if there wasn't, imagine having an exchange currency that
| literally never inflated... that's GOOD. We have been
| hoodwinked into thinking that we need inflation to keep
| up with goods and services, literal stockholm syndrome
| taught by the FED.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| > And even if there wasn't, imagine having an exchange
| currency that literally never inflated... that's GOOD.
|
| I fundamentally disagree. Value comes from building stuff
| not from hoarding. I maintain my intense dislike for
| gold. And I grant that it had the property of having most
| people on this earth consider it the peak of value. Sure
| common belief is a useful property. But I disagree that
| it's a positive outcome or that there couldn't be many
| many other variations except gold.
| SR2Z wrote:
| Hold on - you say "we find more gold every day" and then
| go on to suggest that the money supply doesn't actually
| need to keep up with economic growth?
|
| If we had the technology to maintain 0% inflation, we
| would do that. We can't, and rather than risk deflation
| we instead target low positive inflation. This is because
| deflation leads to nightmare spirals where people start
| stuffing money into their mattresses instead of investing
| in useful things because holding has risk-free guaranteed
| returns that the unpredictable real world can't match.
|
| The amount of gold being mined is not sufficient to keep
| up with economic growth and gold is therefore inherently
| deflationary. It's not a good way to store value, because
| a coin that's going to double in value over two years or
| whatever _is obviously not a stable store of value_.
|
| You can argue about corrosion resistance or whatever
| other physical properties gold might have, but unless the
| civilization collapses you will find just as much luck
| storing your wealth in the database of a major bank.
| Needless to say, designing a civilization around the idea
| that it could collapse at any moment is unnecessary and
| expensive.
| habinero wrote:
| > that's why you can trade and barter random
| objects...imagine having an exchange currency that
| literally never inflated... that's GOOD. We have been
| hoodwinked into thinking that we need inflation to keep
| up with goods and services, literal stockholm syndrome
|
| Gahhh. Stop taking your economics advice from bitcoin
| bros and goldbug weirdos. They don't know how anything
| works and don't want to learn. It's like taking legal
| advice from sovereign citizens. It's not even that
| difficult to understand why it's a terrible idea!
|
| High inflation is bad, sure. Deflation is an economic
| nuke. You know those people who spent like a whole
| bitcoin buying pizza way back when? "If I'd just held
| onto it, I'd have $HUGE_NUMBER now".
|
| Yeah. If your money goes up in value, you have a huge
| incentive to stockpile it and _not_ buy pizza. It 's not
| just Dominos that loses out. All of the people and
| suppliers that go into pizza do, too. You _need_ people
| to spend and lend to have liquidity and money flow.
|
| > we find more gold every day, so there is an easing
| already happening naturally
|
| That's not how that works. You're tying your _entire
| country 's economic growth_ to the production output of a
| _single_ mining industry. Gold is not distributed evenly
| across the globe, either.
|
| And yeah, we did all that in the past, and it caused
| deflation, which caused numerous financial panics [0],
| broke the British economy [1] and after two world wars,
| the US ended up with like 70% of the world's gold [2].
|
| [0] https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/banking-
| panics-...
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_1914
|
| [2] https://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/center/mm/eng/mm_
| dr_01.h...
|
| --
|
| TL;DR: Tying your entire country's economic growth to the
| production output of a single mining industry is stupid
| and we don't do it for very good reasons. Everything is a
| conspiracy if you don't know how anything works.
| panarky wrote:
| Just because a social construct is silly when you think
| about it doesn't make it any less real or useful.
|
| A national border is silly as a physical reality; it is
| just a cartographic whim. These invisible lines, drawn by
| long-dead men, pretend that the lithosphere is
| fundamentally different on one side of a coordinate than
| the other.
|
| Fiat currency is silly as a store of value; it is just a
| digital ledger or a piece of cotton-linen blend. Its
| "worth" is derived entirely from the collective
| hallucination that a central bank's promise is more
| substantial than the paper it is printed on.
| ajross wrote:
| That doesn't make any sense to me. Under Bretton Woods, a
| "dollar" was a contractual equivalent to a fixed amount of
| gold. There's no difference. When people are talking about
| "flow out" they're not talking about _literally_ motion of
| currency[1], just who owns it.
|
| [1] Which is backwards in your reasoning anyway. If you're
| a foreign power wanting to hold dollars, and dollars are
| physical gold coins, then you quite literally need to move
| them physically out of the country, right?
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| I agree with you that Bretton Woods was doomed from the
| beginning, both Keynes and Friedman said so, and this should
| be a better known POV. Economists are not historians though,
| and historians write human-driven stories (i.e., it was
| _Nixon_ who _ended_ Bretton Woods, it 's not that it was
| going to inevitably collapse as an econometric question).
|
| All that said, Bretton Woods matters because people look at
| the gold standard as a time when wages in the United States
| rose. Like that's why Bernie Bros on HN care. It's the same
| reason they oppose globalization: me me me. So it's worth
| knowing why it was flawed. They don't comprehend that before
| and after Bretton Woods, hourly wage charts measured a
| fundamentally different thing.
|
| I think it's better to attack the charts - I mean, you're
| responding to a Charts Guy, a guy who's like, look at this
| Gold Denominated Chart guy - because that's what their brains
| work on. Don't worry about economics. These guys are not
| economists. They are Charts. The real attack on their
| worldview is that, well, just because the year in the X axis
| is an increasing, doesn't mean that you can compare a bigger
| year to a smaller year. They would really like the world to
| be ordered that way, but it's not, and taking leadership on
| convincing them of that is very hard.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and
| ears. It was their final, most essential command.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| government policy definitely has the greatest power to
| create (or destroy) wealth, there are a lot of things
| wrong with economic policy in this country, but floating
| currency exchange is not one of those problems.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| I would argue that any policy that allows the government
| to print money freely and inflate the currency is a major
| thing wrong with a country.
| timeinput wrote:
| Several of them would have protested if they could have
| found the right arguments.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| the best way to expand your worldview is to consider that
| time series charts do not tell a whole, or even accurate,
| story, a lot of the time. for example, looking at a chart
| of a line going up and to the right for money supply
| isn't as meaningful as you think it is.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Perhaps you could expand on why you're convinced the
| entirety of neoliberal economic dogma isn't "me me me"?
|
| The gold bugs are almost entirely on the right. The left
| are far more likely to be MMTers.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > The gold bugs are almost entirely on the right. The
| left are far more likely to be MMTers.
|
| see, i don't want to generalize about left and right.
| it's much simpler than that. look at what this thread is
| actually about: "chart for $/GLD is going up and to the
| right, therefore, gold good." okay? it's not complicated.
| it's not left vs right as much as it is, for every 1
| person who's like, "things are complicated, economics are
| interesting, let's talk about it" there are 19 who live
| day to day in a relentless grind, and get-rich-quick is
| _literally_ their only apparent salvation. they want the
| world to be ordered where they are a Green Wojack, where
| some random bet or gamble makes them a ton of money. that
| 's why we're talking about it, not to figure out economic
| policy. same reason we talk about cryptocurrencies and
| startups. to most regular people - and programmers are
| regular people - it's about, $$$.
|
| it is a totally valid complaint to say, "floating
| exchange rates do not produce charts that go up and to
| the right." I mean, that's their problem! They made the
| wages per hour chart stop going up and to the right! It's
| not that they are bad policy!
|
| Do people on HN care about joe schmoe hourly worker? No.
| You can certainly make tons of money trading currencies,
| but look, these people are not trading. They're gambling.
| This class of get-rich-quick person likes: real estate,
| cryptocurrency, gold, startup stock... are you getting
| it?
|
| You are making it about, "neoliberal dogmas" and "gold
| bugs" or whatever. Trust me, those people are not the
| morons. The gamblers are 10x as stupid. They are the
| antagonists.
| pessimizer wrote:
| All the facts are true here, but "design defect" is silly.
| The entire purpose was to keep a country like the US from
| exploiting its position, and becoming the "world's reserve
| currency" which is just a euphemism for running up massive
| debts to poorer states.
|
| Bretton Woods was sabotaged by the US and the USSR through
| the single vehicle of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Dexter_White. Without a
| Bancor, the _entire system_ simply became a mechanism to
| exploit the poor.
| chvid wrote:
| Excessive debt build up in particular due to the Vietnam war
| caused the US to cancel the dollar gold convertibility.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| Charles de Gaulle was such an incredible man, nearly 60 years
| after his death he still keeps influencing the direction of
| France (for the better)
| jmyeet wrote:
| The funny thing about this is that since 1945, France keeps and
| uses the majority of the gold reserves of 14 former French
| colonies in West and Central Africa and uses that power to make
| them use the CFA Franc, a currency pegged formerly to the French
| Franc but now of course to the Euro [1].
|
| It's worth noting that the stated reason here isn't because of,
| say, US instability but rather "standardizing" the gold. It
| doesn't say what that means but I assume France is basically
| selling some New York held nonstandard gold to "standard" gold
| held in France. "Standard" here probably means a given size and
| purity. Yes, there are different purity levels to gold. So think
| the heavy bullion bars you see on movies.
|
| [1]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-the-france-backed-
| afr...
| jt2190 wrote:
| > 2. Improvement in income from non-monetary activities
|
| > Net income from assets denominated in euro rose by EUR 2
| billion, driven by an increase in outstandings. Income from
| assets held for own account rose by EUR 12.2 billion as a result
| of an exceptional item. In 2025 and at the start of 2026, while
| the volume of gold reserves remained unchanged, the Banque de
| France had to align a residual portion (5%) with technical
| guidelines, resulting in a significant realised currency gain.
| This exceptional foreign exchange income totalled EUR 11 billion
| for 2025.
|
| > Net operating expenditure remained under control, falling to
| EUR 831 million from EUR 888 million in 2024. Since 2015, net
| operating expenditure has fallen by an average of 4.1% in volume
| terms.
|
| > Overall, after transferring EUR 5 billion from reserves and
| booking a corporation tax charge of EUR 1.5 billion, net profit
| for 2025 totalled EUR 8.1 billion.
|
| > A total of EUR 0.4 billion of this amount has been allocated to
| the special reserve, in accordance with regulations, while the
| remainder has been used to clear the deficit in retained earnings
| (EUR 7.7 billion) that was left after the allocation of the net
| loss in 2024
|
| > After clearing these past losses in their entirety, the Banque
| de France's net equity - comprised of own funds plus unrealised
| capital gains on asset holdings - is now extremely solid at EUR
| 283.4 billion, up from EUR 202.7 billion in 2024. The Banque de
| France's net equity includes a revaluation reserve of state gold
| and foreign exchange reserves (RRRODE) of EUR 11.4 billion, to
| cover future monetary expenses
|
| I assume that this increased equity makes selling bonds a bit
| easier?
|
| From: "Net profit of EUR 8.1 billion, enabling the clearing of
| losses carried forward" https://www.banque-france.fr/en/press-
| release/net-profit-eur...
| gtsnexp wrote:
| The "BdF's underground vault in La Souterraine" sounds profoundly
| interesting.
| slater wrote:
| "La Souterraine" is underground, you say? :D
| Arubis wrote:
| Not your keys, not your coins.
| mrits wrote:
| This doesn't make much sense as you would use something like
| this to keep your keys safe.
| Arubis wrote:
| It's a trust issue. And trust and competence are inextricably
| linked.
|
| Most of us with career-track jobs use electronic deposit to
| an account at a bank, and keep things there. The account is
| "yours", and the trust is established over time--most people
| using most banks continue having access to their deposit of
| record most of the time. When that fails, you get a bank run
| --which is systemically undesirable, but also ends with
| people not having "their" money. They thought it was theirs,
| but it turned out not to be.
|
| If your bank started publishing poorly-written notices about
| how they'd terminate accounts and retain holdings for certain
| customers based on arbitrary behavior, and kept changing that
| definition, would you leave "your" money there--even if the
| only alternative were to purchase precious metals and lock
| them up yourself?
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| $15 B gains... Just to put things in perspective: France has a
| GDP of about 3.5 trillion USD and a public debt of 117% of that
| amount. $15 B is not even a drop in the bucket.
|
| To add to France's problem: in 2024 the PIB growth was 1.2%,
| which doesn't even counter inflation. And it's been like that
| since 2008: inflation adjusted in USD, no growth (while both the
| US and China's GDP inflation-adjusted skyrocketed).
|
| The EU, and the eurozone in particular, is totally losing the
| plot: 1 company in the top 50 companies by market cap, ASML (and
| it's not french).
|
| One.
| BrtByte wrote:
| Feels like one of those stories where the headline makes it sound
| geopolitical, but the details are mostly about accounting and
| logistics
| justonceokay wrote:
| Yes and no. Even though the use of USD as reserve has been
| falling globally over time, there are a lot of news articles
| showing up on this site lately about divestment in USD.
|
| So on the surface level this is politics in the sense that it
| marks the end of a long process between two countries.
|
| Deeper, it is very political in that some entity wants to
| normalize and for us to be thinking a lot about the future of
| American isolationism.
| trwhite wrote:
| When is it correct to use "tonnes" or "tons"?
| shin_lao wrote:
| This article is poorly written. No new wealth was created.
|
| They monetized an existing accounting/revaluation gain by selling
| older, non-standard bars and replacing them with compliant bars,
| while keeping the overall gold quantity unchanged. That is not
| the same as "we moved gold home and earned $15B on the move."
|
| In simple terms:
|
| - You buy x of gold at $10
|
| - You sell it much later for $100
|
| - You made a profit of $90, and you hold $100 of cash
|
| - You rebuy x of gold for $100, back to the same gold exposure,
| but on the books, you have $90 of profit
| Galanwe wrote:
| I don't get your point. Gold price increased, the gains were
| unrealized, now they realized when they rolled to a new
| position. The only nitpick would be that they did not mention
| the benchmark rate, so it's hard to guess the absolute gain.
|
| What is poorly written or misleading here...?
|
| That just looks like a normal capital gain to me.
| Bootvis wrote:
| What is the benefit of realizing the gains for France? They
| had gold, they still have gold. They don't pay tax on their
| gold or gains.
| Galanwe wrote:
| I don't think they cared about realizing the gains. They
| just wanted to roll to a new position on higher standard
| ingots. It just so happen that it meant selling/buying,
| which realizes the gains.
| kshacker wrote:
| Capital gain and losses are when you need to pay taxes. If
| you sold 100K of SPY that you bought for 10K actually, and
| bought it back (It is a gain so there is no wash sale)
| immediately, you need to pay taxes for $90K. This is just an
| exchange based on the comments I am reading.
| tensor wrote:
| No, capital gains are simply the amount you earn when
| selling capital for profit. They may be taxed, or may not
| be taxed, depending on the country or location they
| occurred in.
| tensor wrote:
| The article even says exactly that:
|
| "Due to rising gold prices, the move helped the bank to
| generate a capital gain of 13 billion euros ($15 billion),
| bringing it to a net profit of 8.1 billion euros for the 2025
| financial year after a net loss of 7.7 billion euros in
| 2024."
|
| I would have thought the audience here would understand
| something as straight forward as a capital gain.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
| irishcoffee wrote:
| I think the GP was saying that there was no gain. France has
| the same amount of gold they did last week. The whole article
| is like saying "holy shit, france has the exact same amount
| of wealth they did last week!"
| tensor wrote:
| Did you read the article at all? Or just the title? The
| article is about bringing gold back to France by selling US
| bars and buying new bars in Europe. The alternative would
| be melting the bars down and recasting them to the new
| standard.
|
| The capital gain is just a by-product, standard financial
| stuff, but apparently broke HN readers brains.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| I did read the article, thanks for asking.
|
| Sounds like you agree with me, France has the same amount
| of wealth in gold that they had last week.
| tensor wrote:
| I don't care about that. That's not what the article is
| about.
| happyPersonR wrote:
| lol at all the finance folks
|
| This isn't reddit. This is a technical forum. We talk about cool
| tech stuff.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| Good. The US is not to be trusted anymore.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I wonder if someone in Fance recently saw the Die Hard movie
| where thieves robbed the Federal Reserve Bank in NY.
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