Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

France pulls last gold held in US

mining.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 374 posts

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#231

Post by ljlolel »

arjie wrote: post #101
roenxi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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: h…

Ground news?

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#232

Post by wat10000 »

throw0101c wrote: post #126
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.

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 b…

If you prepare for a crash to happen on September 23rd, you're a fool. You can't point to a crash that happens a year later and say you got it right.

But if you prepare for a crash to happen at some point, that's just good sense. Only a fool would think that there would never be a crash. If you arrange your finances to withstand a crash, and there's eventually a crash, then that was the right thing to do even if it took a long time.

Ensuring the independence of your nation is more of the second kind. And it pays off even when there isn't an outright crisis. The policy wasn't "wrong" for decades. It was fine the whole time.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#233

Post by Arubis »

mrits wrote: post #221
Arubis wrote: post #183

Not your keys, not your coins.

This doesn't make much sense as you would use something like this to keep your keys safe.

It's a trust issue. And trust and competence are inextricably linked.

Most of us with career-track jobs use electronic deposit to an account at a bank, and keep things there. The account is "yours", and the trust is established over time--most people using most banks continue having access to their deposit of record most of the time. When that fails, you get a bank run--which is systemically undesirable, but also ends with people not having "their" money. They thought it was theirs, but it turned out not to be.

If your bank started publishing poorly-written notices about how they'd terminate accounts and retain holdings for certain customers based on arbitrary behavior, and kept changing that definition, would you leave "your" money there--even if the only alternative were to purchase precious metals and lock them up yourself?

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#234

Post by xethos »

rkomorn wrote: post #220
rdtsc wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's something that sounds like a plot point for a heist movie.

Which almost might have been one of the arguments the Minister of Finance used to dissuade CDG

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#235

Post by kccqzy »

u1hcw9nx wrote: post #105

>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…

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.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#236

Post by navigate8310 »

codethief wrote: post #51

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),

You sell in country A and buy the *same quantity* in country B. You were just lucky that the gold you bought a century ago was rocketing to Mars.

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#237

Post by sixhobbits »

littlestymaar wrote: post #158
sixhobbits wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

> worth X to the market but X minus 11 billion on paper. Why was it worth “X minus 11 billions”?

Probably based on the price they paid for it or when they last did some kind of asset accounting to calculate the Euro value of all assets held

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#238

Post by whamlastxmas »

erikerikson wrote: post #191
mort96 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Imagine they bought the gold in the US for 1b and sold for 16b. Yes they turned around and purchased 16b of order gold immediately but there's was still a transaction where they sold an asset for more than they bought it.

If you bought your house for $500k 20 years ago, sold it today for a million, then bought it again tomorrow for a million, would you describe that to your friends as having just made $500k? Like yes in the most pedantic technical accounting way it's a gain. In spirit I would call this an unrealized gain

Re: France pulls last gold held in US

#239

Post by esseph »

rkomorn wrote: post #220
rdtsc wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's something that sounds like a plot point for a heist movie.

You should look into how often nuclear weapons are moved by truck.

You've probably driven past more than a few.

Post reply on HN