And winning athletes and sports teams don't go to the white house due to 'scheduling conflicts'. And Amazon paid $75m for a Melania documentary because they saw real profit and need there. And Qatar bought Trump an airplane because it was important for his work. And everyone nominates him for a nobel prize because he ends wars and doesn't get into wars (we're just in a special military operation atm).
Would it count as a "political reason" if their risk management calculations crossed a threshold where it's worth it to move the gold back? I imagine such calculations are done and revised all the time and account for the perceived stability and reliability of a country.
It appears that the gain mentioned is a realization of their asset value. I would also speculate that what happened is that they wanted LBMA bars because those are a standard variety and therefore easily tradable. An arbitrary LBMA bar is generally fungible. I would also speculate that they held many bars in the US from ancient times. After 2008, they repatriated 200-ish tonnes and 'upgraded' them (which I would speculate again is 'ensured they were LBMA-standard').
These articles all have the flavour of the game of telephone common in this style of article where the currency that the gain is in changes wording, the motivation seems to shift, and phrasing lacks real detail instead relying on 'upgrading' and 'refining'.
I wish there were a good LLM agent that were capable of tracing all this back to the real original source that spawned all these things, but the information environment is currently full of smoke and getting real news is quite hard.
I can't realistically conclude whether this was politically motivated or not. The original motivation is sufficiently strong on its own, but it is completely normal for governments to move something to be earlier, or to do a marginal thing if there is other gain.
They started the process in 2005 [1]. The goal has been to upgrade all their goal to modern purity standards (99.999% purity). The repatriation to France may have been done for national security reasons, but not political as in ideological.
> BdF Governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau said the decision to keep the new bars in Paris is “not politically motivated,” as the higher-standard gold bars it bought were traded on a European market.
To be fair, it's an ongoing process started in 2005 and which should finish in 2028. I doubt there was much political (tho the whole tariffs stuff probably made their job/decision easier when the gold price started diverging between NY and European markets). At this point it was cheaper than flying the gold to CH for recasting.
(1784 tons moved to standardized holding over the years, 134 tons are now left to convert -- all stored in Paris)
