It's only a few tonnes, equal to just 0.2% of the remaining total, but the amount of gold stored in the United States by foreign governments, central banks and international authorities has shrunk to the lowest in seven decades, dropping 13 tonnes beneath the lows seen five years ago to the smallest quantity since 1957.
What does this mean for geopolitics and the gold market? In absolute terms, the outflow isn't remarkable. Nor is the trend new. Starting in 1974, the quantity of gold held under ‘earmark’ by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for foreign accounts shrank almost without pause for 50 years.
Between 2014 and 2016 alone, nearly 420 tonnes left the care of the US central bank, with 300 tonnes removed by Germany's Bundesbank as it rearranged its holdings to become now the second largest sovereign gold reserves on official data behind the United States' own holdings.
That long-term decline in New York Fed holdings, however, mapped gold's fading role in the global monetary system, while Germany's headline-grabbing reallocation a decade ago reflected a changing approach to the location and management of national gold reserves.
The latest outflows, in contrast, have come amid the most serious rupture in the Western world's political alliance since the mid-1960s, when president Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO's integrated command structure and also withdrew gold from the New York Fed's care.
In 2026, France has now taken the last of its US holdings to zero (indeed, it now stores all its metal in Paris), selling the final 129 tonnes and repurchasing new bars elsewhere for transport home between July 2025 and January this year.
Although Banque de France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau denied any political motivation for the move, it was followed in March-to-August by De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) removing 78 tonnes, cutting Dutch gold holdings in New York to 113 tonnes as it boosted its holdings in London, saying that this ‘improved tradability’ should the need to sell ever arise, making the Netherlands ‘better prepared for severe crises...in view of increasing geopolitical unrest’.
The DNB didn't say which ‘unrest’ it was worried about, but financial data suggests that Donald Trump has damaged how safe other governments feel in leaving any sovereign assets in US custody.
Foreign central-bank holdings of US treasury bonds in Federal Reserve custody have fallen by one-eighth over the past three years, while holdings of US government agency debt, predominantly mortgage-backed securities, have fallen by two-fifths.
Gold, in other words, is far from the only thing affected by today's great rupture in geopolitics and specifically within the Western post-war alliance. But whatever the outcome of the US midterm elections this November may mean for Trump's final two years in office, gold is very much part of the story.
Buying gold is always and everywhere a political decision, a rejection of counterparty promises and obligations in favour of a silent, unchanging lump of metal.
Location has become increasingly political, too. Emerging-market giants China, India and Russia chose to keep most or all of their gold at home rather than in New York or global-market centre London as they began to build their reserves during the early 2000s.
Many other gold-buying nations have done the same after Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine saw its foreign-held assets frozen by the US and EU.
Now the shoe is on the other foot, and European nations are reconsidering their holdings as the Western alliance threatens to break.
‘Foreign securities and deposits can potentially be frozen. Physical gold held domestically is not subject to the same risk,’ noted Bundesbank president Joachim Nagel at this year's LBMA/LPPM precious metals conference in October, even while saying that he doesn't suffer sleepless nights over keeping one-third of Germany's gold at the New York Fed.
But ‘given, among other things, the recent threatening language from Washington towards Greenland and thereby on NATO ally Denmark, would it not be wise, as a precaution, to repatriate the Dutch gold stored in New York as soon as possible?’ asked one member of the Tweede Kamer to the Netherlands minister of finance this January, two months before the DNB began its transfers.
Both the DNB and Bundesbank have also said that their IT departments are reducing their reliance on US cloud and software services by switching to European providers, as has the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Its then-chief prosecutor was locked out of his Microsoft account in May 2025 and Washington has since imposed personal sanctions on him and other ICC judges after they issued an arrest warrant against key Trump ally prime minister Netanyahu of Israel for alleged war crimes in Gaza.
Analysts in both the Netherlands and Germany were quick to link this attack on the formerly US-led 'rules-based order' to the DNB's reduction of US gold holdings when its transfers were announced in September.
Unlike New York Fed custody, the Bank of England in London, the private market's central gold trading and storage hub, is now more popular as a custodian than at almost any point in the past 13 years.
Standing today above 5,470 tonnes when the UK's own reserves are excluded (and also including an unknown quantity of private-sector metal for London's gold clearing banks), the BoE's custodial gold holdings have risen by one-tenth since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.
While they remain a little smaller than the New York Fed's ‘earmarked’ holdings of 5,725 tonnes, their rise echoes Europe's growing rebuff to Trump's trade tariffs, military threats and even political sanctions against post-WW2 allies.
What does this mean for private-sector investors in gold as we look towards 2027?
The world is ‘in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,’ as Dr Zenghui, vice president of China's Shanghai Gold Exchange, told the LBMA/LPPM conference last month, where China and Hong Kong also invited global bullion banks and traders, as well as foreign central banks, to hold some gold with them. So too did Singapore.
Chinese custody may appeal to governments involved in Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative perhaps, but privately-owned bullion is likely to remain wary of the Communist dictatorship. Meanwhile, Hong Kong's appeal has been seriously damaged by the state's crackdown on pro-democracy protests and activists.
Singapore, on the other hand, has gained a reputation as the ‘Switzerland of the East’, welcoming flows of foreign capital in and out of its widely admired legal and economic jurisdiction.
Singapore has benefited from the damage to Hong Kong's appeal among Asian wealth managers and it continues to attract steady growth in global investors' precious metals custody, too.
Users of BullionVault, for instance, have grown their gold holdings in Singapore nearly one-tenth by weight since Trump won the 2024 election and 60% by value thanks to the surge in prices.
But while Singapore now holds more than three times as much gold for our clients as does New York, it remains two-thirds smaller than London and barely 9% the size of Zurich.
That's because, in the final analysis, liquidity matters, and gold trading in London, fed by physical stockpiles in Zurich, continues to outstrip the value of gold derivatives trading in New York, never mind the volumes seen in Shanghai, Hong Kong or Singapore.
There is, of course, always a trade-off between liquidity and security. But the ructions now shaking the Western world's political alliances make the Bundesbank's strategy look wise, keeping some gold at home in Frankfurt, some in the world's premier trading venue of London, and some across the ocean on another continent in New York.
Private investors and wealth managers wanting to spread their geographic and geopolitical risk can do so just as easily and quickly as they can spread their financial risk by including gold among their assets.
In an increasingly uncertain world, the question may not simply be what role gold should play in a diversified portfolio, and where that gold should be held.
Adrian Ash is director of research at BullionVault. The views expressed above should not be taken as investment advice.