France repatriated gold worth $14 billion — now others may follow

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France carries out a quiet gold exodus from Wall Street

Since mid-2025, Banque de France has sold 129 tonnes of gold stored in New York — valued at 13 billion euros, equivalent to roughly 150 billion Norwegian kroner — and repurchased equivalent quantities for storage in Paris. According to Yahoo Finance, this was accomplished without any physical transport; instead, the French employed what is known as "financial repatriation," achieving the same result in terms of control through market transactions.

This is not the first time France has challenged Anglo-American dominance over gold. In 1965, President Charles de Gaulle dispatched a warship to New York to retrieve gold in exchange for dollars — a direct protest against what he called the United States' "exorbitant privilege" within the Bretton Woods system.

Russian reserves turned the tide

Many economists trace the immediate catalyst for the current wave of gold repatriation to a single event: the freezing of approximately $300 billion in Russian foreign currency reserves in 2022 following the invasion of Ukraine.

The movement is driven "not by logistics, but by doubt about the political and legal security of the US as a neutral custodian" — Judith Arnal, Elcano Royal Institute

Judith Arnal, senior economist at Spain's Elcano Royal Institute, describes a shift in which central banks are now asking fundamental questions about whether assets held in foreign jurisdictions can truly be considered fully sovereign. The 2022 episode demonstrated that the answer is not necessarily yes.

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Record-breaking central bank purchases

According to the World Gold Council's (WGC) 2025 central bank survey, 59 percent of central banks now store at least a portion of their gold domestically — up from 41 percent in 2024 and 50 percent in 2020. The total value of gold held in central bank vaults worldwide reached approximately $4 trillion in early 2026, surpassing for the first time since the Bretton Woods era the value of those same institutions' holdings in US Treasury bonds.

Germany carried out one of the most extensive repatriation programmes between 2013 and 2017, bringing home 674 tonnes from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Banque de France. Poland, Hungary, and India have all taken similar steps in recent years — India repatriated 100 tonnes from the Bank of England in 2024, citing among other reasons the desire to avoid custody fees.

A signal of a more multipolar financial system?

The question now being asked in financial markets is whether this represents something more than pragmatic risk management. Arthur Azizov, CEO of B2BROKER Group, describes a transition from a "buy and hold" strategy to active management, in which gold is kept at home as an institutional hedge that can be mobilised immediately in a crisis.

It is important to emphasise that repatriation does not necessarily mean that countries are actively moving away from the dollar system as a whole — many of the same nations continue to hold large dollar reserves. The more nuanced reading is that they are diversifying risk and reducing exposure to geopolitical pressure tied to any single jurisdiction.

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What does this mean for European countries going forward?

Source material from Yahoo Finance suggests that several European countries may follow France's example. No specific countries have been named, and no confirmed plans from other central banks have been announced at this stage. 24markets will continue to monitor developments.

For Norwegian readers, it is worth noting that Norges Bank manages the country's foreign currency reserves primarily in the form of government bonds and equities through the Government Pension Fund Global — not in physical gold. Norway is therefore not a central player in this trend, but the developments remain relevant as a backdrop to the broader geopolitical risk landscape in international financial markets.

Sources: Yahoo Finance, World Gold Council Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey 2025, B2BROKER Group, Elcano Royal Institute