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Comment by shin_lao | Hacker News Reader

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

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I don't get your point. Gold price increased, the gains were unrealized, now they realized when they rolled to a new position. The only nitpick would be that they did not mention the benchmark rate, so it's hard to guess the absolute gain.

What is poorly written or misleading here...?

That just looks like a normal capital gain to me.

What is the benefit of realizing the gains for France? They had gold, they still have gold. They don't pay tax on their gold or gains.

I don't think they cared about realizing the gains. They just wanted to roll to a new position on higher standard ingots. It just so happen that it meant selling/buying, which realizes the gains.

Capital gain and losses are when you need to pay taxes. If you sold 100K of SPY that you bought for 10K actually, and bought it back (It is a gain so there is no wash sale) immediately, you need to pay taxes for $90K. This is just an exchange based on the comments I am reading.

No, capital gains are simply the amount you earn when selling capital for profit. They may be taxed, or may not be taxed, depending on the country or location they occurred in.

The article even says exactly that:

"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."

I would have thought the audience here would understand something as straight forward as a capital gain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

I think the GP was saying that there was no gain. France has the same amount of gold they did last week. The whole article is like saying "holy shit, france has the exact same amount of wealth they did last week!"

Did you read the article at all? Or just the title? The article is about bringing gold back to France by selling US bars and buying new bars in Europe. The alternative would be melting the bars down and recasting them to the new standard.

The capital gain is just a by-product, standard financial stuff, but apparently broke HN readers brains.

I did read the article, thanks for asking.

Sounds like you agree with me, France has the same amount of wealth in gold that they had last week.

I don't care about that. That's not what the article is about.

>> The article is about bringing gold back to France by selling US bars and buying new bars in Europe. The alternative would be melting the bars down and recasting them to the new standard.

> Sounds like you agree with me, France has the same amount of wealth in gold that they had last week.

What did I miss?

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