[coldtea]

As @somenameforme wrote:

[] they sold their 'non-standard' (seems to be bars below the modern purity standards) US reserves, and replaced them with new reserves purchased elsewhere which are now stored in France. As the price of gold continued to rise as they did this, they ended up making a bunch of dinero while also centralizing their reserves.

sounds like a gain to me.

[mort96]

A gain of $15b? That's roughly the value of 100 metric tons of gold, remarkably close to the 129 tons that the article says was moved... did they double the value of their gold?

[mhluongo]

When something is "realized" is a matter of accounting. It means to make the change, they sold the gold fo currrency, then bought it back. For many of us, realizing a gain is when taxes happen, though I'm not sure what it means for a nation state.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/realizedprofit.asp

[mort96]

So they could sell it again and buy it again and realise another $15b?

[atombender]

No, there wouldn't be any gains to realize — unless the gold price went up since they bought it, of course.

If you buy something for $10 and sell at $15, you realized a gain of $5. If you then buy at $15 and sell it at $15, you realized a gain of $0.

[coldtea]

That's an orthogonal matter (if the gain/loss was calculated correctly).

But they didn't just move gold bars around, is my point, and in what they did (sold, rebuy) there indeed was an opportunity to make a gain.