>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,"
rdtsc 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
kipchak 1 minutes ago [-]
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]
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.
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 33 minutes ago [-]
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 24 minutes ago [-]
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.
rdtsc 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
bigfishrunning 11 minutes ago [-]
A half-ton truck is a consumer pick-up truck, not a commercial shipping vehicle. Much much smaller.
vel0city 16 minutes ago [-]
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?
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.
> 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 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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
benreesman 45 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
expedition32 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
hypeatei 3 hours ago [-]
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.
byroot 2 hours ago [-]
Nitpick, but France never left NATO proper, only the integrated command, and reintegrated it in 2008 under Sarkozy.
doe88 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
c7b 3 hours ago [-]
He also called Brexit before the UK had even joined.
corford 1 hours ago [-]
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 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
stingraycharles 2 hours ago [-]
I think that is the part that the parent is referring to.
throw0101c 2 hours ago [-]
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:
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.
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 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
c7b 2 hours ago [-]
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.
dboreham 1 hours ago [-]
Time to make the "De Gaulle was Right about everything" baseball cap.
kergonath 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
stingraycharles 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
moffkalast 3 hours ago [-]
De Gaulle of this man.
iamsomewalrus 10 minutes ago [-]
Underrated comment
cladopa 5 hours ago [-]
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.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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?
raincole 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
You treat your brokerage account this way? I'm sure that the retirement funds don't.
raincole 1 hours ago [-]
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 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
1 hours ago [-]
PaywallBuster 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
They "realized" it just for a short time.
direwolf20 3 hours ago [-]
From paper shenanigans. Don't expect accounting spreadsheets to perfectly mirror real life. Most of the financial economy is kayfabe.
AnimalMuppet 2 hours ago [-]
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.
fakedang 3 hours ago [-]
The variation in gold prices in the time they carried out this exchange process.
littlestymaar 3 hours ago [-]
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…
sixhobbits 3 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
> worth X to the market but X minus 11 billion on paper.
Why was it worth “X minus 11 billions”?
6031769 3 hours ago [-]
Welcome to the wonderful world of commodities trading.
cloudbonsai 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
The transport would likely be quite expensive as well. Lots of armed people needed to move gold around, plus special vehicles.
tonfa 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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).
2 hours ago [-]
_heimdall 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
michaelt 4 hours ago [-]
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)
Rexxar 3 hours ago [-]
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.
coldtea 5 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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?
coldtea 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mhluongo 4 hours ago [-]
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.
So they could sell it again and buy it again and realise another $15b?
atombender 3 hours ago [-]
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.
daneel_w 3 hours ago [-]
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 45 minutes ago [-]
If it were that simple, the gain would be much more. Gold sold at $35/troy ounce then; over $4000 now.
> 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.
0dayman 5 hours ago [-]
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
bamboozled 5 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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.
w4yai 51 minutes ago [-]
u mad bro ?
codethief 5 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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?
erikerikson 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
codethief 4 hours ago [-]
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!
huhtenberg 4 hours ago [-]
Gold is down 10+% since its recent peak. They likely sold then and repurchased later.
mort96 4 hours ago [-]
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.
defrost 3 hours ago [-]
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.
danparsonson 4 hours ago [-]
Other costs? Deviations in the actual figures from the estimates we're using here? 100 is not a million miles away from 129.
amelius 2 hours ago [-]
Gold prices probably went up due to turmoil in middle east.
samus 4 hours ago [-]
Dumpling $15B on the market should lead to a drop. Anyway, the gold price is not always going up.
mort96 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
Very succinctly stated, thank you!
worldvoyageur 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 48 minutes ago [-]
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 37 minutes ago [-]
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 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
adastra22 4 hours ago [-]
Did they buy before selling? Otherwise that doesn’t make sense.
samus 4 hours ago [-]
The gold price is fluctuating. It doesn't always go up.
lljk_kennedy 4 hours ago [-]
Sell at high, buy at low?
nashashmi 3 hours ago [-]
Is that what led to gold price falling?
Finnucane 1 hours ago [-]
Actually reading the comments first because the page isn't loading for me.
carefree-bob 6 hours ago [-]
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?
stackbutterflow 5 hours ago [-]
It's gold only if it comes from the Dore région of France. Otherwise it's just sparkling metal.
sph 5 hours ago [-]
That accent somehow migrated two characters too far.
stavros 5 hours ago [-]
Nah that's how it's spelled in French.
sph 5 hours ago [-]
True, but ‘Doré’ means golden, and would make for a better joke.
The French part in that sentence should be the name of the region (eg Doré(e) ), not "région", and if you wanted to use the French spelling of "région", you'd have to say "région Dore".
Using the French spelling of région but the wrong word order doesn't make sense.
stavros 5 hours ago [-]
Ahh I see, thanks.
IAmBroom 35 minutes ago [-]
There is no joke so funny and trivial that HN can't overthink and criticize it.
stavros 33 minutes ago [-]
Above all, we want our comedy accurate.
jjgreen 4 hours ago [-]
True connoisseurs prefer the metal from Lingots.
IAmBroom 35 minutes ago [-]
It's in the terroir.
somenameforme 6 hours ago [-]
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.
berkes 5 hours ago [-]
> 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 5 hours ago [-]
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.
tonfa 4 hours ago [-]
> 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).
(so it's kinda irrelevant, it's just they have to put it in their books)
wqaatwt 5 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
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.
wqaatwt 5 hours ago [-]
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..
eru 5 hours ago [-]
I don't understand this. Did they increase the overall amount of gold they held?
KaiserPro 5 hours ago [-]
Sold it at the peak, and then bought it locally a few months later.
rstarast 5 hours ago [-]
First sell the gold, then buy same amount at a slightly lower price a bit later (on average)
xvedejas 5 hours ago [-]
> the price of gold continued to rise as they did this
This would mean they sold low and bought high, right?
DaedalusII 5 hours ago [-]
price of gold dropped from $5500 to $4600 in the last few weeks then came back. all is possible
mort96 4 hours ago [-]
Then they didn't make money as a result of the price rising, which is what the original commenter and article claimed.
renewiltord 5 hours ago [-]
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.
coldtea 5 hours ago [-]
Usually that's how you want your selling and buying combos to be...
berkes 5 hours ago [-]
But the gold price has been rising (on average) a lot over the period July 2025 to January 2026
tonfa 5 hours ago [-]
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 5 hours ago [-]
Impossible to make anywhere close to that amount since they only sold 129 tonnes
kzrdude 6 hours ago [-]
They sold the existing holdings and bought new of equivalent weight(?), so somehow they ended on profit on those moves.
tonfa 5 hours ago [-]
The profit is just realizing the gains (resetting the cost basis for accounting purpose).
wodenokoto 5 hours ago [-]
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.
> 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?
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 35 minutes ago [-]
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 16 minutes ago [-]
The doesn’t answer the question.
zelphirkalt 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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.
KingOfCoders 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, close Ramstein and close Landstuhl, which were used for every US war in the Middle East in the last 30 years.
praptak 3 hours ago [-]
Nothing wrong with going for the low hanging fruit first.
samus 3 hours ago [-]
The USA is threatening to pull out of NATO anyway, so those might go away.
zelphirkalt 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ur-whale 2 hours ago [-]
> 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 2 hours ago [-]
US also has gold reserves and investments in Germany. They can be seized.
PowerElectronix 4 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
gtsnexp 48 minutes ago [-]
The "BdF’s underground vault in La Souterraine" sounds profoundly interesting.
TacticalCoder 17 minutes ago [-]
$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.
jmyeet 2 hours ago [-]
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.
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 3 hours ago [-]
Russia's frozen assets probably were considered safe by the similar calculations. Everything is safe until it is not.
mort96 12 minutes ago [-]
I don't understand what point you are making.
gostsamo 2 hours ago [-]
The gas supply from Russia was announced as secure* until it was not.
* mainly by Russia and people on their payroll that is.
seydor 5 hours ago [-]
Of course not . absolutely definitely nothing to do with the mad king (who is great and handsome)
NoLinkToMe 5 hours ago [-]
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).
roenxi 6 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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
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').
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.
atombender 3 hours ago [-]
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.
> 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 5 hours ago [-]
Well they are probably just being diplomatic, there is no point in accidentally triggering the ape.
tonfa 4 hours ago [-]
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)
avadodin 4 hours ago [-]
"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.
Ecco 6 hours ago [-]
Reading the article is what made him say that.
5 hours ago [-]
dev1ycan 2 hours ago [-]
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)
wolvoleo 5 hours ago [-]
We in Holland should do the same but our government (especially the right wing VVD) adores the US so they never bothered :(
Avalaxy 4 hours ago [-]
The netherlands as a whole should do this. Not just holland.
wolvoleo 3 hours ago [-]
Oh yes that's what I mean. I don't like calling it the Netherlands.
As I hate our government I don't play by their rules.
Besides, Holland is shorter and easier to pronounce.
ezequiel-garzon 1 hours ago [-]
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?)
ur-whale 2 hours ago [-]
> 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 2 hours ago [-]
True everyone loves hooters :3
fasdfplasjk5425 4 hours ago [-]
Looks like we're at the beginning of
FBRICS
praptak 3 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
Alexzoofficial 4 hours ago [-]
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picsao 5 hours ago [-]
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renewiltord 5 hours ago [-]
I did this once. I bought Bitcoin on an exchange for $65k then I transferred it to my own wallet for a gain of $65k then I sold that for $65k for a total of $130k. Then I used the $130k on the exchange to buy Bitcoin again. Before I knew it, I was a trillionaire. Unfortunately the last time I tried to do it I bought my coins on FTX.
When you buy it make sure you use a French account though. If you use any other account then transferring the Bitcoin will just get you a Bitcoin not both the Bitcoin and the money. It’s European mathematics.
Rendered at 14:08:14 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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,"
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.
[1]https://archives-historiques.banque-france.fr/ark:/56433/115...
[2]https://www.lesechos.fr/finance-marches/banque-assurances/st...
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_trucking_indust...
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...
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.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/august-15-1971_b_4284327
Whether the exact ship was a battleship or a destroyer might make the search result.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
[] 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.
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.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/realizedprofit.asp
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.
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.
> 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:
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.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monts_Dore
Using the French spelling of région but the wrong word order doesn't make sense.
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.
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.
On top of this, this is physical gold, so location of the gold must play into it as well.
> 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...
The last time they asked for their gold back Nixon "temporarily" ended the convertibility of the USD to gold.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
FBRICS
When you buy it make sure you use a French account though. If you use any other account then transferring the Bitcoin will just get you a Bitcoin not both the Bitcoin and the money. It’s European mathematics.