Foreign Affairs

French Bank Yanks Gold Bars From US, Makes $15,000,000,000

(YouTube/AIIMS)

France’s national bank removed and sold all of its remaining gold held by the U.S. Federal Reserve, netting a profit worth nearly $15 billion, multiple outlets reported.

The Bank of France announced it netted 12.8 billion euros — equivalent to $14.8 billion — after it finished pulling 129 tons of gold from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and replacing it with higher-quality gold stored in Paris, Radio France Internationale (RFI) reported Saturday. The massive amount of the precious metal represented 5% of the bank’s total reserves.

The French central bank’s new stock of gold bars in Paris complies with up-to-date international standards, according to Newsweek. The upgrade gradually occurred over several months starting in July 2025. Its completion in January marked the first time in about 100 years that France did not keep any of its gold at New York City’s Fed branch, mining.com reported.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Western nations freezing Russian assets following the country’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine set the precedent for France’s sell-off. He noted that while other European countries have discussed removing their gold reserves from the U.S., France was the first to act.

“France is the only one that’s formally moved. Germany and Italy have talked about it,” Hanke, who served on President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, told the DCNF. “The discussion, the anxiousness and the risk of having their assets somehow frozen if they were in the United States came up when in February 2022 the central bank assets of Russia were frozen — because the standard before that had been these were untouchable central bank assets.”

“And so that was the start of things,” Hanke said. He noted that then-U.S. President Joe Biden “led the charge” in breaking from the precedent in which the “reserves of central banks were off limits” and “had sovereign immunity.”

“They had sovereign immunity, but we froze them,” the applied economics professor said. “Biden led that charge. That came from the United States. Everybody else piled on, but the lead was the United States.”

Hanke said that “the straw that broke the camel’s back” convincing France to pull its gold from the U.S. was the “insulting behavior” President Donald Trump “has displayed toward” French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte.

“And there will be more countries that do this, because the Israeli-U.S. war on Iran will definitely cause a lot of pivoting away from the United States by everyone,” he added. “My guess is [Germany and Italy] might follow France’s lead. And the rationale will be this general behavior of the Trump administration. And more precisely, the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, a war of choice that wasn’t approved by anyone.” 

Former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget J.D. Foster told the DCNF that, “symbolically,” France moving the gold means it is “further cutting ties with the United States, making it easier in the end for the United States to cut ties with Europe.” He said France’s ties with the U.S. are disappearing “one by one.”

“Substantively, it doesn’t mean a damn thing. These gold reserves are relics of a bygone era. We have fiat currencies now,” he said. “And think about it: $15 billion in gold reserves when trillions flow through New York markets hourly, some days every minute.”

“France, and most especially President [Emmanuel] ‘lame-duck’ Macron, remains a clown show. They are only doing this out of petty spite, like a three-year-old’s temper tantrum,” Foster added, referring to the French leader, who is term-limited in 2027. “Make no mistake — if somebody wants to give me $15 billion in gold bullion, I won’t complain, but relative to national output, the money supply, the vast flows of capital internationally, it’s a flea’s fart in a hurricane.”

The Bank of France has taken steps to update its gold supply since 2005, per RFI. While it had held gold in the U.S. since the late 1920s, the French bank removed the majority of its stock of the metal it held in both U.S. and U.K. banks during the mid-1960s.

With the culmination of its recent sell-off, the entirety of France’s 2,437-ton gold reserves is now in Paris, the outlet reported. The European country has the fourth-largest gold stock in the world behind the U.S., Germany and Italy.

Germany currently has 1,236 tons of gold — about 37% of its total 3,350-ton reserves — in the U.S. Federal Reserve in New York and an additional 12% in London.

Leading German economist Emanuel Mönch in January called for Germany to remove its U.S. held gold, collectively worth $142 billion, arguing it was too “risky” to store the bullion under the Trump administration’s watch.

“Given the current geopolitical situation, it seems risky to store so much gold in the U.S. In the interest of greater strategic independence from the U.S., the Bundesbank would therefore be well advised to consider repatriating the gold,” Mönch told German newspaper Handelsblatt in German.

(Featured Image Media Credit: YouTube/AIIMS)