Banque de France wants Paris to compete with London for gold trade

[pmbug]

Paris has vaulting ambitions to capture a share of the world gold trade from London, reviving its historic role as a top-tier power in the international bullion market.

The Banque de France has teamed up with JP Morgan to offer a full range of swaps, leases, and gold deposits for global central banks and sovereign wealth funds. Global reserve managers will be able to pledge bullion as collateral for deposits or for raising foreign currency on the Paris market.
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One aim is to muscle in on the swap business as gold becomes eligible collateral under the Basel III framework for banks. ...

More: http://gata.org/node/18607

I am interested to know more about that eligible collateral / Basel III comment. Last I had heard, they had declined to move gold to Tier 1.

 

[ancona]

Good luck with that frog boys!!

The gold market is a very old and stubborn one, and I dare say they would be hard to convince to make any big, new, bold moves. Trust is hard to earn ion a business like that, and even harder to keep once you build it. Yanking up long growing roots and moving to an entirely new nation would be a disaster I believe.

Leave well enough alone I say.

 

[11C1P]

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As one of my former squad leaders said so eloquently once upon a time "Fuck france!" His dad was stationed there when france left NATO & kicked out the U.S. military.

Excerpt from the end of the article;

"In 1966, upon being told that Charles de Gaulle had taken France out of NATO and that all U.S. troops must be evacuated from French soil, President Lyndon Johnson told Secretary of State Dean Rusk: 'Ask him about the cemeteries, Dean!'

So, at end of the meeting, Dean asked de Gaulle if his order to remove all U.S. troops from French soil also included the 60,000 plus soldiers buried in France from World War I and World War II. De Gaulle never answered. "



https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1161642/As-France-rejoins-NATO-humorous-reminder-missed-them.html

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[pmbug]

Interesting take on the story:

...
As to whether Paris will “gradually re-emerge as a key marketplace for gold” as Sylvie Goulard claims, is unclear. But more importantly, it seems that if bullion banks (including JP Morgan) are engaging with the Banque de France on expanding gold lending out of Paris, then this is a sign that the bullion banks are having to look further afield for physical gold with which to continue to supply gold centres such as the Far East.
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More (long): https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/r...-and-jp-morgan-team-up-to-boost-gold-lending/

 

[pmbug]

At a time when most of the major central banks are accumulating gold to protect themselves against a new financial crisis, the Banque de France has set up a scheme to exchange and lend the reserves held in Paris. ...

... Last October, in a small specialized British magazine (The Alchemist), the new deputy governor of the Bank of France - Sylvie Goulard - announced the forthcoming use of the stock of gold kept in the coffers of the institution, until 'here carefully kept out of the market. In this document, she explained that she had a partnership "with a large commercial bank active in the gold market". A few weeks later, Reuters said the bank in question was the US agency JP Morgan, a leading speculator in the commodities and currencies market.

Little on the subject, Sylvie Goulard nonetheless mentioned gold loans to financial institutions and gold-currency exchanges with other institutions. It also welcomed a whole paragraph of the renovation of the Parisian vaults of the Bank, which now allows the use of powerful forklifts and facilitates the handling and transport of ingots ...

... Christian Eugène, former Head of the International Debt Department at the Banque de France declares:

I am a little surprised because most of the gold stock still belongs to the state. Using this heritage does not seem to me a good idea, especially in a financial context full of risks.

But Sylvie Goulard wants to go fast, very fast. Internally, she formed a firm so as not to be dependent on operational services. "It's new, nobody had ever done that before," says a connoisseur of the institution. In the case of the appointment of the current first governor to head the ECB, some see her already become head of the country's most powerful financial institution.

As little known to the general public, the one that was propelled Deputy Governor in January 2018 by decree of the President of the Republic has a political past already very full. In May 2017, following the election of Emmanuel Macron, she was appointed Minister of Armies; at once, it did not hide its desire to reshape the French army for the sole purpose of constructing an integrated European defense. She will resign four weeks later. In the meantime, her past as a far-sighted 'consultant' to the Berggruen Institute - an American lobby aimed at speeding up 'European integration' - was out in the press, while her name was cited in a presumption of fictitious jobs from Modem in the European Parliament.

Her activism for the creation of a central state on the continent comes from far away, and she does not hide it. Romano Prodi's political advisor to the European Commission between 2001 and 2004, she presided over the European Movement between 2006 and 2010. That year, she created with the deputies Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Guy Verhofstadt the group Spinelli, a structure that promoted especially for the reduction of bilateral relations between States in order to better centralize power in Brussels. Partisan of the CETA, a vast commercial treaty with Canada, Sylvie Goulard co-signed in 2012 'From Democracy in Europe' with the very federalist Mario Monti, a politician who then headed the Italian government.

The rush with which the deputy governor wants to use our gold reserves can question. "Making loans on gold or swaps [exchange of currency against gold] is tantamount to pledge this stock, to mortgage it. It is clear that launching gold deals is tantamount to losing full ownership. We no longer have possession of the property so that it serves as a guarantee for something else, "warns Christian Eugene.
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(in French): https://www.politiquemagazine.fr/economie/la-france-est-elle-en-train-dhypothequer-son-stock-dor/

 

[rblong2us]

Shouldnt be too hard to sort out the storage that would rival London's

The physical has gone so all you need is room to store a hard drive ffftt:

https://www.123rf.com/photo_2515385_tradtional-wooden-thunderbox-outside-toilet.html