Bloomberg found itself at the receiving end of sharp ridicule on X after it retracted a story claiming the Reserve Bank of India had sold a portion of its gold reserves.
The story, published on June 2, drew from an analysis by Bloomberg Economics. It claimed India's central bank may have offloaded a portion of its gold holdings to shield its foreign-currency assets from the cascading fallout of the Iran war.
The claim was wrong.
The Press Information Bureau's Fact Check Unit was the first to publicly flag the report as false. PIB pointed to RBI data showing that India's gold holdings had not declined. The share of gold in India's total foreign exchange reserves had been rising steadily: from 13.92 per cent at the end of September 2025, to 16.70 per cent by March 31, 2026, and further to 16.85 per cent as of May 22, 2026. A rising share does not support the claim of a selloff.
The RBI directly addressed the media reports, calling them incorrect. In a statement, the central bank said it had come across media accounts of an alleged gold sale and wanted to set the record straight.
"The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has come across reports in certain sections of the media about RBI's sale of gold. The RBI emphasises that these reports are not correct," it said.
The RBI pointed to its Monthly Bulletin as the primary source for verified data, noting that its physical gold stock remains unchanged at 880.52 metric tonnes. It urged the public to rely only on official disclosures.
Bloomberg eventually pulled the report and issued a retraction. "Bloomberg News retracted a story published June 2 that was based on an incorrect analysis by Bloomberg Economics. The analysis erroneously used the same-day domestic gold prices to value the RBI's gold reserves. Using the previous day's London Bullion Market Association price shows that gold holdings were unchanged in May," it said.
The error was methodological. Bloomberg Economics had used the same-day domestic gold prices instead of the previous day's price from the London Bullion Market Association, an internationally recognised benchmark, to value the RBI's reserves. The correction reversed the conclusion entirely.
Bloomberg has retracted a post on X based off an inaccurate Bloomberg Economics report https://t.co/XtCWbLM03p https://t.co/JrW6Pymib4
— Bloomberg (@business) June 4, 2026
The retraction did not land quietly. Social media users were quick to call out the organisation, with many arguing the damage had already been done.
X user Sheela Bhatt, posting as @sheela2010, tagged Bloomberg's official account and wrote that she was "feeling so ashamed that it's keeping an apology under the paywall." The criticism over the paywall was widespread. Several users noted that the retraction, much like the original story, was not freely accessible, while the flawed report had already crossed one million impressions.
A user posting as Vajra (@BholeNath_wasi) asked pointedly: "Too late. Are you going to fire the person who generated the fake report and his/her boss or just delete the tweet?"
Another user, लक्ष्य (@lk6nar), wrote: "Imagine how many fake stories you must have peddled that nobody fact-checked, and you never retracted them. Such a shame on one of the world's largest business news platforms!!"
Bloomberg was rechristened "Doomberg" by at least one user. Several others alleged that the timing of the story, published just before the RBI's Monetary Policy Committee meeting, was deliberate and intended to trigger panic around India's economy. Bloomberg has not addressed these allegations.
The episode drew attention on Reddit, too, where the conversation took a more pointed political turn. "At the risk of sounding like a BJP fanatic, western media despises Indian growth. They want us to be perpetual consumers, like cattle. Harmless, docile and ready to be milked," wrote one user in a thread about the retraction.
The sentiment reflected a broader mood online: that the error was not simply an editorial lapse but part of a pattern of negative framing of India's economy by Western financial media.
