211–220 of 374 posts
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, bla…
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.
As a French speaker, I looked up French sources and found https://www.lesechos.fr/finance-marches/banque-assurances/st... - here is a snippet translated to English below. But many more references can be found by googling "opération vide-gousset". 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 repatria…
> Ultimately, De Gaulle abandoned the Colbert plan, and French gold returned from the United States in small quantities.
So I think the story about the warship got twisted from a plan or threat to "it actually happened". Doing it in small quantities over a few years was the right way, indeed. Looking back it seems like it didn't make many waves in the news at the time, so Giscard was absolutely right.
>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 the…
>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 the…
From Franceэs perspective, they were just playing by the rules
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.
> I couldn’t find any clear news source or academic reference to that event. 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...
Your source confirms it as well:
> Involving the French Navy was considered, but that would have blown the operation’s cover. Instead, BdF used ocean liners from the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique
So it was multiple trips and in commercial liners.
Feels like one of those stories where the headline makes it sound geopolitical, but the details are mostly about accounting and logistics
So on the surface level this is politics in the sense that it marks the end of a long process between two countries.
Deeper, it is very political in that some entity wants to normalize and for us to be thinking a lot about the future of American isolationism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
My counter to this is that such an occurrence was increasingly likely starting around the time the massive US Evangelical base was essentially fully captured by (and became a wing of) the Republican party. It was more and more obvious over a period of at least 40 of those 60 years you mention.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I couldn’t find any clear news source or academic reference to that event. 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...
What happened is the gold got repatriated. I was looking for a source that a French warship docked and started loading thousands of tons of gold. Your source confirms it as well: > Involving the French Navy was considered, but that would have blown the operation’s cover. Instead, BdF used ocean liners from the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique So it was multiple trips and in commercial liners.