The crown jewels that were stolen from the Louvre in Paris last month have been valued at 88 million euros (about $103 million). It was a brazen daylight raid on the world’s most famous museum. Several suspects have since been arrested, but the jewels have not been recovered.
What does it mean that the French state was its own insurer for the jewels? How do stolen jewels enter the black market? Why are art thefts on the rise in Europe?
Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: The French state is said to be its own insurer for the jewels stolen from the Louvre. Does that just mean they weren’t insured at all?
Adam Tooze: The essence of insurance is that you delegate some of the risk of something that can happen to you to somebody else. And then that can take lots of different forms, public, private, but it’s always about involving someone else or some group of other people. So you have a bunch of rich people who basically decide to take a gamble on certain sorts of risks. And there are various settings where you can’t really effectively do that. In big macroeconomics, we talk about emerging markets self-insuring against the risk of financial crisis by building foreign exchange reserves. They hold the foreign exchange reserves for the event of a shock. And they’ve insured themselves by paying the cost of holding the reserves all of that time.
By law, the great museum collections of France are prohibited from taking out private insurance. It’s a way of guarding against being exploited by the insurance business. What is the price of insuring the Mona Lisa? The costs would be exorbitant. Ultimately, the great art treasures of France—many of which, of course, were pillaged in Italy under Napoleon—are assets of the French state. And that effectively means that, in layperson’s terms, they’re not insured. And this is just a loss to the French taxpayer.
It may have a meaning within the balance sheet of the French state, in the same way as if the central bank holds a huge portfolio of treasuries and interest rates go up and the value of those treasuries goes down, the central banks will book losses, and then in some cases they will be indemnified by the treasury for those losses. But they are all essentially on the public balance sheet. So the Louvre may have a claim against the French Treasury.
CA: Authorities have suggested that the jewels were stolen in order to be broken down and for the constituent jewels and precious metals to be introduced to the black market. What is the economy related to doing so? Is there an economy dedicated to getting stolen art into the black market?
AT: There is. It’s a substantial market. I mean, so substantial that in the 2000s, the FBI established a specialized unit to deal with it. This was after the catastrophe of the pillaging of the great Baghdad museums after the American and British invasion in 2003—we think about 15,000 objects went missing. It’s maybe the third of the great illicit markets behind drugs and weapons. Tens of thousands of art objects go missing every year and feed into this market. So it’s really large.
The striking thing is that art figures as prominently in the imagination both of the public and of thieves as it does because it’s the hardest thing to do anything with. It’s much easier to break up a complicated piece of 19th-century jewelry and sell off the individual components.
As people know, the gold market has gone crazy. And so there have been a series of very serious thefts. Perhaps the most terrible in terms of art historical loss was a raid on a Dutch-located exhibition of priceless archeological artifacts from Romania of the Dacian civilization, [some of which] were displayed for the first time outside Romania. And a gang, a much more professional gang, earlier this year raided that museum. They used explosives to blow their way in. They did it in the dead of night. And we’re talking about millennia-old gold artifacts that are most likely just being melted down for their gold value. I mean, it is horrifying to think about. But the vast majority of objects are not of that type. They are the sorts of things that you can see in the Getty Museum [in Los Angeles]. The Getty Museum is thought to be probably the largest repository of recently stolen artifacts, which were looted from Italy in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s and put on the market. And Getty apparently used his yacht—one of the things he liked to do was to use it for little shopping trips to Italy, where they would pick up artifacts. Their most famous bronze statue has recently been formally identified as the result of theft by the highest European court.
So we should expect that to be going back to Italy. That was a ruling in 2024. And it’s a series—we’ve spoken about various elements of this chain. Generally speaking, what happens is that people do illegal excavations in Italy, the objects are then slowly laundered, they often go via free ports in Switzerland, and they will then emerge on the market after various sorts of laundering transactions that are intended to make it look as though it didn’t just come out of the ground and will then find their way to a legitimate auction house where you hope, fingers crossed, that it’s not picked up. And that’s the crucial hurdle you have to cross. Or it’s a private transaction. There are very substantial amounts of these kinds of artifacts in private collections. Obviously, you can’t do this with a Rembrandt or Leonardo da Vinci because there are just too few of them. But if you’re talking about classical artifacts that come out of the ground, where we don’t really have a complete inventory to start with and so it’s possible to basically create legends around them, it’s a much more open market for this kind of black market dealing in illegal archeology.
CA: Thefts of artworks seem to be on the rise in various European countries. Might there be an economic reason for that? How should we think about this trend in economic terms?
AT: Yeah, it’s a very interesting idea that these are like the ultimate nonfungible objects and so, you know, they become more attractive in a world of abstraction, digitization. I think that logic is real. I mean, the art market in this particular moment is actually in a slump. So you wouldn’t expect it on that basis. I think the precious metal value is something. Diamonds are also in a huge slump because of the vast boom in synthetic diamond production. So some of those logics will be cutting the other way. I think maybe there are two things to say. One is that it’s totally clear that, yes, over the last 50 years, art theft has a cycle. It has a history, and that history is linked to broader macroeconomic conditions or geopolitical events. I alluded to the pillaging of the Baghdad museums. In terms of sort of public media attention to art theft, it’s really the 1970s when the modern art theft business gets going.
That was a moment of inflation—so nonfungible objects, their real values increase, and that increases the incentive. And the other point I would put in play right now is the disproportion between the value of these objects and the resources available to the museums to actually protect them. I mean, the Louvre is essentially massively underprotected. So it’s a kind of combination of market forces on the one hand—this public collection of assets that sit on the French government’s balance sheet, you know, that’s the insurance part of this—and austerity, which for decades has basically deprived public cultural institutions of the basic investments that would be necessary to protect those public assets.
So you have a kind of dynamized entrepreneurial criminal space, you have these piles of assets sitting conspicuously on the public balance sheet, and you have decades of penny-pinching budgetary constraint on a giant museum—the biggest museum in the world, just by size—underspending on those same institutions. So we could have a kind of, let’s blame neoliberalism. We could just make the long story short and blame neoliberalism. It’s neoliberalism and austerity. It creates this disparity, and that would explain it all.