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>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,"

You seem to imply that Charles de Gaulle and his policy of converting dollars to gold caused the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. That was a myopic view. The whole Bretton Woods system was doomed from the beginning due to design defects.

The system was conceived with the primary goal of maintaining balance of payments equilibrium for all countries at the expense of economic growth and liquidity. It had become clear that if a country wanted its currency to be the world reserve currency it had to run a balance of payment deficit. And the United States clearly wanted its dollar to be the reserve currency unbridled by any balance of payment constraints.

If the United States had balance of payment surpluses as it had in the early years, the system lost liquidity (other countries wanted to buy U.S. exports but had neither gold nor dollars to do so), reducing the surplus. And if the United States had balance of payment deficits, well, gold would flow out of the United States, and the United States could not meaningfully increase public debt or spending.

> 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 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.

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.
Excessive debt build up in particular due to the Vietnam war caused the US to cancel the dollar gold convertibility.
De Gaulle of this man.
From Franceэs perspective, they were just playing by the rules
"closed the gold window" is a weird euphemism for "defaulted"
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"

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)

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.

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.

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.

> This is not gain at all. At least in theory: You own some tons of gold at the start of the process, you have the same tons of gold at the end of the process.

I see a lot of comments like this but I just can't get my head around what you are trying to prove (or disprove).

Every definition of gain (or loss for that matter) implies that the same amount of _something_ is now worth more (or less) than when you bought it.

Following you logic, if I buy a share of MSFT at $10, sell it for $100, there is no gain because I still have 1 share of MSFT?

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.
> The only real gain is that you have gold in the US custody and the US can be tempted to just use it without telling you anything.

What if you're at war, you can't risk to get your gold out and the US doesn't sell you anything because.. you can't pay?

If your solution is to "write France's debt on a piece of paper and hope they honor it", I've got some news to tell you about the system you just "invented."

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.

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 article is poorly written. No new wealth was created.

They monetized an existing accounting/revaluation gain by selling older, non-standard bars and replacing them with compliant bars, while keeping the overall gold quantity unchanged. That is not the same as "we moved gold home and earned $15B on the move."

In simple terms:

- You buy x of gold at $10

- You sell it much later for $100

- You made a profit of $90, and you hold $100 of cash

- You rebuy x of gold for $100, back to the same gold exposure, but on the books, you have $90 of profit

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?

On that topic, video about the underground vault: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txyKenOq5Pw
This seems to be the source article (Reuters, March 24): https://www.reuters.com/business/french-central-bank-books-1...
Germany also needs to pull all gold. We have 1236t there.
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...

Not your keys, not your coins.
> 2. Improvement in income from non-monetary activities

> Net income from assets denominated in euro rose by EUR 2 billion, driven by an increase in outstandings. Income from assets held for own account rose by EUR 12.2 billion as a result of an exceptional item. In 2025 and at the start of 2026, while the volume of gold reserves remained unchanged, the Banque de France had to align a residual portion (5%) with technical guidelines, resulting in a significant realised currency gain. This exceptional foreign exchange income totalled EUR 11 billion for 2025.

> Net operating expenditure remained under control, falling to EUR 831 million from EUR 888 million in 2024. Since 2015, net operating expenditure has fallen by an average of 4.1% in volume terms.

> Overall, after transferring EUR 5 billion from reserves and booking a corporation tax charge of EUR 1.5 billion, net profit for 2025 totalled EUR 8.1 billion.

> A total of EUR 0.4 billion of this amount has been allocated to the special reserve, in accordance with regulations, while the remainder has been used to clear the deficit in retained earnings (EUR 7.7 billion) that was left after the allocation of the net loss in 2024

> After clearing these past losses in their entirety, the Banque de France’s net equity – comprised of own funds plus unrealised capital gains on asset holdings – is now extremely solid at EUR 283.4 billion, up from EUR 202.7 billion in 2024. The Banque de France’s net equity includes a revaluation reserve of state gold and foreign exchange reserves (RRRODE) of EUR 11.4 billion, to cover future monetary expenses

I assume that this increased equity makes selling bonds a bit easier?

From: “Net profit of EUR 8.1 billion, enabling the clearing of losses carried forward” https://www.banque-france.fr/en/press-release/net-profit-eur...

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.
Good. The US is not to be trusted anymore.
$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.

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)
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.

Feels like one of those stories where the headline makes it sound geopolitical, but the details are mostly about accounting and logistics
I wonder if someone in Fance recently saw the Die Hard movie where thieves robbed the Federal Reserve Bank in NY.
Site doesn't load for me. https://archive.is/ePH8u
lol at all the finance folks

This isn’t reddit. This is a technical forum. We talk about cool tech stuff.

The "BdF’s underground vault in La Souterraine" sounds profoundly interesting.
When is it correct to use “tonnes” or “tons”?
Not done for political reasons.
Looks like we're at the beginning of

FBRICS

good target for the Louvre thieves!
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.