alt Hacker NewsFrance pulls last gold held in US for $15B gain
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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.
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),
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?
At least they got their gold this time.
The last time they asked for their gold back Nixon "temporarily" ended the convertibility of the USD to gold.
This seems to be the source article (Reuters, March 24): https://www.reuters.com/business/french-central-bank-books-1...
On that topic, video about the underground vault: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txyKenOq5Pw
Germany also needs to pull all gold. We have 1236t there.
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.
Site doesn't load for me. https://archive.is/ePH8u
We in Holland should do the same but our government (especially the right wing VVD) adores the US so they never bothered :(
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.
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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.
>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,"