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France pulls last gold held in US

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Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#171

Post by rdtsc »

avianlyric wrote: post #155
rdtsc wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

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.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#172

Post by kergonath »

dboreham wrote: post #152
hypeatei wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Time to make the "De Gaulle was Right about everything" baseball cap.

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.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#173

Post by enoint »

shevy-java wrote: post #75

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 w…

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.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#174

Post by IAmBroom »

codethief wrote: post #168
worldvoyageur wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

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 th…

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.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#175

Post by expedition32 »

okanat wrote: post #128
ur-whale wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#176

Post by IAmBroom »

stavros wrote: post #40
rkomorn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ahh I see, thanks.

There is no joke so funny and trivial that HN can't overthink and criticize it.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#177

Post by stevenwoo »

sschueller wrote: post #114
KingOfCoders wrote: post #52

Germany also needs to pull all gold. We have 1236t there.

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?

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.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#179

Post by lazide »

rdtsc wrote: post #171
avianlyric wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#180

Post by codethief »

IAmBroom wrote: post #174
codethief wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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.

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.

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