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>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 stoppe
by u1hcw9nx 7mo ago
>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 their currencies to the dollar.
around 1965, De Gaulle initiated a systematic, aggressive policy where they converted USD into physical gold every time French acquired USD from trade, then French Navy picked those gold bullions from NY. By 1971, the US gold reserves had decreased so much that they did not cover the dollars circulating globally and Nixon "closed the gold window,"
- hypeatei 7mo agoDe 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.
- c7b 7mo agoHe also called Brexit before the UK had even joined.
- stingraycharles 7mo agoI think that is the part that the parent is referring to.
- corford 7mo agoIIRC, De Gaulle & Churchill proposed a UK-FR union at one point (1940?) but it didn't get sufficient support within the French government. Interesting to ponder what the war and later EU trajectories might have looked like if that had happened.
- philistine 7mo agoThat union was a last ditch effort to try and keep France in the war. If they had implemented it, it would have been undone once the nazis were beaten you can be sure.
- thmsths 7mo agoFrom my recollection, the plan was to grant French citizenship to every British citizen and vice versa, in effect "forcing" the governments to defend their citizens to the end. This was very ambitious, hence why it probably did not happen. But if it had happen, I have a hard time seeing how it could be undone, stripping people of their citizenship, even if they have a second one is no trivial matter.
- UncleSlacky 7mo agoIt was suggested again in 1956 in the context of the Suez crisis: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6261885.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6261885.stm
- weitendorf 7mo agoThat was also a last-ditch effort to maintain pre-WW2 geopolitical structures rather than a bipolar US-sphere vs Soviet-sphere world. Note that this was basically the nail in the coffin that led to their full-fledged decolonization in the following years. At the time the UK still held very significant military and political sway over the middle east, east africa, and asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire#/media/File:British_Decolonisation_in_Africa.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire#/media/File:Bri...
- byroot 7mo agoNitpick, but France never left NATO proper, only the integrated command, and reintegrated it in 2008 under Sarkozy.
- simgt 7mo agoSarkozy, who renamed what descended from De Gaulle's party into "Les Républicains" because of his obsession for the US. Who also got sponsored by Gaddafi, and invited him to pitch his tent in the Elysée's garden. And who ten years ago was still spewing climate change denial crap. He probably still would, but he's too busy talking about how his 10 days in prison was the most atrocious experience a human being had to endure. Funny how much his pathetic 5 years in office keep on giving.
- throw0101c 7mo agoCertainly 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny It reminds me of the folks that keep saying there will be a major crash on Wall Street year after year after year… and then it just happens to be occur. * https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/12/rich-author-poor-readers/ https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/12/rich-author-poor-re...
- c7b 7mo agoIn what sense was the policy wrong? Emphasizing independence when it comes to security doesn't strike me as self-evidently wrong. Curious to hear your arguments. "They were very happy about it 60 years later" alone isn't evidence of it being wrong.
- dkga 7mo agoI 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.
- throw0101c 7mo agoYes, 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 know the 'insurance premium' that was paid by France every year and the total.
- slfnflctd 7mo ago> There just happened to be a whacko that got into the White House 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.
- stingraycharles 7mo ago[dead]
- dboreham 7mo agoTime to make the "De Gaulle was Right about everything" baseball cap.
- kergonath 7mo agoLet’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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- UncleSlacky 7mo agoOr a "De Gaulle Apology Form": https://i.redd.it/opw3zv6x4qke1.png https://i.redd.it/opw3zv6x4qke1.png
- doe88 7mo ago> to build an independent French nuclear program For which France was helped by the UK, so it certainly would make sense if France helped the europe and uk to build its own nuclear deterrence.
- aubanel 7mo agoThat was a cooperation, both sides benefitted. So there's no debt to repay.
- mistrial9 7mo agoFrance is currently contacting selected partners to build a collective nuclear weapon coalition, probably focusing on Norway due to their location and recent oil wealth. Given recent events, reasonable people may disagree strongly on the directions that is leading.
- lostlogin 7mo agoEurope isn’t pulling its weight in defence spending. But if it tries to it’s also a problem?
- xorcist 7mo agoThe problem is that Europe does not spend enough on US weaponry. Bulding nukes domestically does not help with that. NATO was explicitly built to keep Europe in line. That worked to the benefit of everyone, until national security intrests and land expansion put a stop to it.
- moffkalast 7mo agoDe Gaulle of this man.
- iamsomewalrus 7mo agoUnderrated comment
- ur-whale 7mo ago> 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.
- okanat 7mo agoJust 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.
- Iulioh 7mo agoThis behavior is economically inefficient, that's why it's criticized. And it's undeniable But the point is that "economical efficiency" is not the only metric that matters, stability and power do not come cheap.
- ivell 7mo agoI think many academics are often specialized in one area of their expertise and overfit in that dimension. Journalists pick this up and promote those views a bit too much. This results in non-optimal decisions due to skewed public perceptions. We need to promote holistic thinking considering multiple dimensions and not just one where academics are proficient in.
- Iulioh 7mo agoThe problem is that there isn't simply an efficient solution for everything. At one point every problem has solutions with pros and cons France could do it as it is a rich and big country but smaller countries do not have a viable choice. This reasoning could have been applied to France too in another universe. It's a balance impossible to totally tilt one way or another. So no amount of extra information could help when it's matter of opinion at the end of the day
- rdtsc 7mo ago> 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.
- avianlyric 7mo agoGold 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 Navy vessel sailing into NY loading up with some supplies and leaving. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10tonnes+of+gold https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10tonnes+of+gold
- rdtsc 7mo agoFor 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.
- lazide 7mo agoMost 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.
- _heimdall 7mo agoWas that the case in the 60s as well? I know trucks of that era had much lower capacity than today, even when comparing across class like "half-ton" trucks.
- BrtByte 7mo agoFrom Franceэs perspective, they were just playing by the rules
- mohamedkoubaa 7mo ago"closed the gold window" is a weird euphemism for "defaulted"
- flowerthoughts 7mo ago"I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further."
- kccqzy 7mo agoYou 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.
- regnull 7mo agoOk, bear with me for a moment - what if the US would use actual physical gold coins instead of dollars? Then your argument of "gold would flow out" would not hold - so the only reason for it to flow out was that the gold standard was fake - the lax money policy of the US was the issue, not the gold standard itself.
- cyberax 7mo ago> Ok, bear with me for a moment - what if the US would use actual physical gold coins instead of dollars? You'll get a bear economy, leading to the eventual deflation and collapse. Fun fact: it was not hyperinflation in Weimar Germany that led Hitler to power but _deflation_ because of its insistence on sticking to the gold standard.
- kr1m 7mo ago> Fun fact: it was not hyperinflation in Weimar Germany that led Hitler to power but _deflation_ because of its insistence on sticking to the gold standard. Do you have a source for this? AFAIK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...
- chvid 7mo agoExcessive debt build up in particular due to the Vietnam war caused the US to cancel the dollar gold convertibility.