It's Not About Global Insecurity

The fact that many central banks are repatriating their gold reserves from the UK and US stems from the belief that if their government falls afoul of Washington, DC, they will lose access to their gold stores at a critical point.

Maintaining one's own gold reserves is a PITA compared to allowing the gnomes in The City of London and Wall Street keep them in their vaults, unless you stop believing that they can be relied on.

Global central banks are removing gold from vaults in London and New York as they become more skittish about storing bullion outside their own borders, according to a new survey.

The central banks of India and France are among those that have relocated huge volumes of gold out of the US and UK in the past year to store more domestically — part of a trend of the institutions bringing bullion home and also diversifying the storage location of their reserves.

For years, central banks have been increasing their holdings of gold, which recently surpassed US Treasuries to become the world’s top reserve asset, as many seek alternatives to the US dollar, the world’s de facto reserve currency.

However, increasing geopolitical conflict, sanctions regimes and a decline in trust have put strains on a gold trading system that relies heavily on London — where huge vaults at the Bank of England store more than $700bn of the yellow metal — and on New York, the world’s largest gold futures market.

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The news comes as Singapore and Hong Kong have been working to offer vaulting services to central banks that are looking to diversify their storage. Singapore’s deputy prime minister on Monday said the city-state would launch an over-the-counter clearing system for gold this year, along with a vaulting service for central banks.

One of the biggest recent repatriation programmes has been in France, which removed 129 tonnes of gold from the New York Federal Reserve between July 2025 and January 2026 and now stores all its gold domestically.

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Over the past three years, India’s central bank has also repatriated most of the gold it held overseas with the Bank of England and the Bank for International Settlements.

The share of its gold held overseas by the Reserve Bank of India dropped to 22 per cent in March 2026 from 55 per cent in March 2023, according to the central bank’s data. The RBI did not respond to a request for comment.

Let me be clear here, I do not believe that gold reserves are that significant in the modern financial system, but the movement of these assets is an indication of reduction of trust in the US and UK, and that is significant.