France pulls last gold held in US for $15B gain
mining.com239 points by teleforce 5 hours ago
239 points by teleforce 5 hours ago
>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,"
> 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.
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.
Nitpick, but France never left NATO proper, only the integrated command, and reintegrated it in 2008 under Sarkozy.
Certainly debatable.
De Gaulle started this 'policy' in 1965 and it's mainly the current leadership situation that's been a problem—60 years later. So to a certain extent the policy in question was 'wrong' for decades. How "right" can you really consider them when it was a problem year after year, decade after decade:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny
It reminds me of the folks that keep saying there will be a major crash on Wall Street year after year after year… and then it just happens to be occur.
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/12/rich-author-poor-re...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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"
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?
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.
You treat your brokerage account this way? I'm sure that the retirement funds don't.
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).
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
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?
From paper shenanigans. Don't expect accounting spreadsheets to perfectly mirror real life. Most of the financial economy is kayfabe.
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.
The variation in gold prices in the time they carried out this exchange process.
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.
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.
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.
The transport would likely be quite expensive as well. Lots of armed people needed to move gold around, plus special vehicles.
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)
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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),
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?
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!
Gold is down 10+% since its recent peak. They likely sold then and repurchased later.
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.
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.
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.
Other costs? Deviations in the actual figures from the estimates we're using here? 100 is not a million miles away from 129.
Dumpling $15B on the market should lead to a drop. Anyway, the gold price is not always going up.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
It's gold only if it comes from the Dore région of France. Otherwise it's just sparkling metal.
That accent somehow migrated two characters too far.
Nah that's how it's spelled in French.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> In le figaro they report the profit is due to variation in price between the different transactions. Which seems to be a polite way to say they took exceptional risk.
Nah it's just regular realized gain (delta between acquisition price and selling price).
https://www.banque-france.fr/fr/actualites/resultats-2025-de...
(so it's kinda irrelevant, it's just they have to put it in their books)
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.
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.
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..
I don't understand this. Did they increase the overall amount of gold they held?
First sell the gold, then buy same amount at a slightly lower price a bit later (on average)
> the price of gold continued to rise as they did this
This would mean they sold low and bought high, right?
price of gold dropped from $5500 to $4600 in the last few weeks then came back. all is possible
Then they didn't make money as a result of the price rising, which is what the original commenter and article claimed.
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.
But the gold price has been rising (on average) a lot over the period July 2025 to January 2026
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.
Impossible to make anywhere close to that amount since they only sold 129 tonnes
They sold the existing holdings and bought new of equivalent weight(?), so somehow they ended on profit on those moves.
The profit is just realizing the gains (resetting the cost basis for accounting purpose).
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.
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...
The funny thing about this is that since 1945, France keeps and uses the majority of the gold reserves of 14 former French colonies in West and Central Africa and uses that power to make them use the CFA Franc, a currency pegged formerly to the French Franc but now of course to the Euro [1].
It's worth noting that the stated reason here isn't because of, say, US instability but rather "standardizing" the gold. It doesn't say what that means but I assume France is basically selling some New York held nonstandard gold to "standard" gold held in France. "Standard" here probably means a given size and purity. Yes, there are different purity levels to gold. So think the heavy bullion bars you see on movies.
[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-the-france-backed-afr...
Germany also needs to pull all gold. We have 1236t there.
With the way the US is going that might just end up in a gold trump statue instead
But that statue would rotate to face the sun!
If Turkmenistan can have it, why not the US?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_Monument
(Though it no longer rotates.)
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
Yes, close Ramstein and close Landstuhl, which were used for every US war in the Middle East in the last 30 years.
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.
On that topic, video about the underground vault: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txyKenOq5Pw
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.
> 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.
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)
Not done for political reasons.
Of course not . absolutely definitely nothing to do with the mad king (who is great and handsome)
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).
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.
Russia's frozen assets probably were considered safe by the similar calculations. Everything is safe until it is not.
The gas supply from Russia was announced as secure* until it was not.
* mainly by Russia and people on their payroll that is.
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.
They started the process in 2005 [1]. The goal has been to upgrade all their goal to modern purity standards (99.999% purity). The repatriation to France may have been done for national security reasons, but not political as in ideological.
[1] https://www.banque-france.fr/fr/actualites/resultats-2025-de...
If you search Google for "France sells US gold for 13b euro gain" you'll find lots of results. The reasons provided across the various articles are:
1. The bars were of an old variety and therefore not standard tradable.
2. Transporting them, refining them, and recasting exceed the cost of selling kind #1 and obtaining kind #2
Here's one such link though it appears there's some primary source everyone is rewriting: https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20260404-french-central-bank-ne...
It appears that the gain mentioned is a realization of their asset value. I would also speculate that what happened is that they wanted LBMA bars because those are a standard variety and therefore easily tradable. An arbitrary LBMA bar is generally fungible. I would also speculate that they held many bars in the US from ancient times. After 2008, they repatriated 200-ish tonnes and 'upgraded' them (which I would speculate again is 'ensured they were LBMA-standard').
https://www.moneymetals.com/news/2024/10/05/why-france-repat...
These articles all have the flavour of the game of telephone common in this style of article where the currency that the gain is in changes wording, the motivation seems to shift, and phrasing lacks real detail instead relying on 'upgrading' and 'refining'.
I wish there were a good LLM agent that were capable of tracing all this back to the real original source that spawned all these things, but the information environment is currently full of smoke and getting real news is quite hard.
I can't realistically conclude whether this was politically motivated or not. The original motivation is sufficiently strong on its own, but it is completely normal for governments to move something to be earlier, or to do a marginal thing if there is other gain.
What makes you say that?
> 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.
Well they are probably just being diplomatic, there is no point in accidentally triggering the ape.
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)
"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.
We in Holland should do the same but our government (especially the right wing VVD) adores the US so they never bothered :(
The netherlands as a whole should do this. Not just holland.
Oh yes that's what I mean. I don't like calling it the Netherlands.
> 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.
Looks like we're at the beginning of
FBRICS
EUBRICS, but it also includes Canada but not Russia and it's really more like "sane countries readjusting their politics against a mad ape".
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.