3 Sep 2026 5:30 AM
The Dutch Central Bank has shifted gold reserves worth about $12bn (€10.35bn) from New York and Ottawa to London, citing concerns about increasing global geopolitical unrest.
Between March and August, the bank transferred approximately 86 tons of gold – more than a quarter of the bullion it holds in the US and Canada – to the UK capital. London now holds nearly a third of Dutch gold reserves, the largest share.
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“With this relocation, we have improved the tradability of our gold reserves,” Dutch Central Bank governor Olaf Sleijpen said in a statement. “We expect that we will never need to use them, but we do need to strengthen our resilience and preparedness.”
London hosts the world’s most liquid gold market, where hundreds of billions of dollars worth of metal changes hands every week. For this reason central banks have long used the Bank of England as a custodian for their metal, where it can be quickly sold or bought in large quantities, or lent out to raise dollars.
Gold stored at the Bank of England must also meet international market standards for weight and purity, making bars held there readily interchangeable and easier to trade.
“Gold stored at the Bank of England in London must comply with modern international trading standards and is considered the most easily tradable gold in the world,” the Dutch central bank said. “This makes it the quickest for DNB to deploy in a crisis situation.”
The Dutch move comes just months after the French central bank sold its bullion reserves held in the US and replaced them with reserves in Paris, an operation it said was intended to bring its gold bars into line with international standards.
Central banks have long spread their gold across several countries, balancing the security of domestic storage against the ability to trade or mobilise reserves quickly in major financial centres.
But geopolitical tensions are prompting more reserve managers to reconsider where their bullion is kept. A growing share are looking to diversify or repatriate their holdings, according to a recent central bank survey.
“Keeping a larger share of the gold reserves in London strengthens the function of gold as an anchor of trust,” the Dutch central bank said.
The central bank holds 30.8pc of its 612.4 tons of gold reserves at its cash centre in Zeist, south-east of Amsterdam.
The Dutch Central Bank executed the move by selling approximately 59 tons of gold in New York and buying the equivalent amount in London. More than 27 tons of gold were also physically moved from the US and Canada to Zeist, and a similar quantity of gold was then transferred to London.
The move is not the first time the Netherlands has reduced its gold reserves in the US. In 2014, the central bank reduced the amount stored in New York city from 51pc of the total, and repatriated it to the Netherlands. That shift was to align with other central banks that store a larger portion of their gold reserves domestically.
New York’s vast stockpile of central-bank gold is largely a legacy of World War II and the Bretton Woods era, when European countries moved bullion to the US for safekeeping and later accumulated dollar reserves that could be converted into gold.