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,"
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.
[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?
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.
Do you have a source for this? AFAIK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_trucking_indust...
[1]https://archives-historiques.banque-france.fr/ark:/56433/115...
[2]https://www.lesechos.fr/finance-marches/banque-assurances/st...
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.
It happened though. Here are the sources for it:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock#Criticism_and_decl...
- https://www.thegoldobserver.com/p/how-france-secretly-repatr...
- https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/1994/128/arti...
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 Générale Transatlantique
So it was multiple trips and in commercial liners.
You've probably driven past more than a few.
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.
Valéry 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.
> 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.
Whether the exact ship was a battleship or a destroyer might make the search result.
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.
The dude was a visionary for many things, but I didn't know about this. Borderline prescient. What a guy.
But the point is that "economical efficiency" is not the only metric that matters, stability and power do not come cheap.
We need to promote holistic thinking considering multiple dimensions and not just one where academics are proficient in.
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.
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
He was a patriot and very pragmatic. He knew France had been diminished. He had no time for delusional ideas.
Funny how much his pathetic 5 years in office keep on giving.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire#/media/File:Bri...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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"
That's it. It has nothing to do with whether your RAM is stored in New York or Paris.
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.
However, that doesn't mean there isn't profit possible, even over a supposedly super-liquid asset like gold.
If they held it for 100 years and finally sold it, then profit/loss is realized now
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.
Edit: wtf is going on with you for downvoting a question…
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.
Why was it worth “X minus 11 billions”?
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.
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)
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.
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)
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.
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.
[] 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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
(I know share rehypothication exists, but it shouldn't)
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.
EDIT: Wow, gold prices!
Correct. A better way to put it is you shorted the USD. Which is a smart move at any rate. So a gain indeed.
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.
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
What is poorly written or misleading here...?
That just looks like a normal capital gain to me.
"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.
The capital gain is just a by-product, standard financial stuff, but apparently broke HN readers brains.
Sounds like you agree with me, France has the same amount of wealth in gold that they had last week.
> 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),
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Mark-to-market accounting systems are one way to deal with this quirk, but they create their own issues.
A central bank answers directly to the government, not the judiciary. But it still answers to power, and follows established rules.
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.
"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?
Using the French spelling of région but the wrong word order doesn't make sense.
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
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.
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)
Different gold, and two financial transactions, accounts for the financial gain.
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.
This would mean they sold low and bought high, right?
In reality the article is attempting to account for a capital gain pnl accounting for taxes.
They have ~same amount of gold between both years and it doesn't look like they took extra market risk.
The US could re-create the same “gain” by selling and repurchasing their gold. Fundamentally doesn’t really matter.
On top of this, this is physical gold, so location of the gold must play into it as well.
If Turkmenistan can have it, why not the US?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_Monument
(Though it no longer rotates.)
They had better act fast, before an executive order prevents that from ever happening.
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?
> 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...
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.
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.
The last time they asked for their gold back Nixon "temporarily" ended the convertibility of the USD to gold.
This isn’t reddit. This is a technical forum. We talk about cool tech stuff.
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...
* mainly by Russia and people on their payroll that is.
I'd read the article, but the site seems to be down.
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.
[1] https://www.banque-france.fr/fr/actualites/resultats-2025-de...
(1784 tons moved to standardized holding over the years, 134 tons are now left to convert -- all stored in Paris)
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.
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.
FBRICS
As I hate our government I don't play by their rules.
Besides, Holland is shorter and easier to pronounce.
it was tongue-in-cheek dude.
literal people are a hoot.