Gold has overtaken US Treasuries in global reserves

Posted on: 11 February 2026

For the first time since 1996, the world's central banks hold more gold than US government bonds. Nearly four trillion dollars in bullion against three point nine trillion in Treasuries, according to the World Gold Council. Three consecutive years of purchases exceeding one thousand tonnes annually, double the historical average. China alone has been buying for fifteen straight months. Seventy-six per cent of central banks say they will increase gold reserves over the next five years. Seventy-three per cent expect to reduce dollar holdings. These are not speculators chasing a rally. These are the institutions that built, managed and underwritten the dollar system for half a century. And they are buying the one asset that works when that system stops working. Without saying so. Without announcing it. Just doing it.

Let that sink in for what it actually means. The same institutions that spent fifty years telling the world "trust unbacked currency, the dollar is worth what it's worth, Treasuries are the universal safe haven" are stockpiling the metal that by definition serves when unbacked currency loses credibility. This is not commentary. It is World Gold Council data, central bank balance sheets, official survey declarations. The arsonist's insurance policy, playing out in real time.

The silence is part of the mechanism. If a central bank announced it had lost confidence in the dollar, it would accelerate the very collapse it is hedging against. So it buys and reassures. Accumulates gold and continues to denominate everything in dollars. The day it stops being an open secret, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The system holds as long as everyone keeps pretending.

Then came the crash of 30 January, which tells the other side of the story. Gold went from a record near 5,600 dollars an ounce to 4,400 within hours: minus twenty-one per cent. Silver lost forty-one per cent from its peak above 121 dollars, the worst single-day drop since 1980. The official catalyst was Trump's nomination of Kevin Warsh to chair the Federal Reserve. But the official catalyst is never the real one. Exchanges raised margins. Forced liquidations cascaded. According to market reconstructions, JPMorgan closed roughly ten billion dollars in silver short positions at the exact market bottom, all 633 delivery notices settled at that precise price. The timing is so perfect it looks choreographed. Perhaps because it was.

This is where the blade goes in. Central banks buy gold for years, a thousand tonnes annually, with no market mechanism penalising them. Their buying is what analysts call price-insensitive: no margin calls, no stop losses, no panicked investors to answer to. They sit above the rules of the game they themselves wrote. When retail investors and speculators do the same thing, that is, bet that gold is worth more than paper, the system responds with raised margins, forced liquidations and flash crashes that wipe out weeks of gains in hours. The message could not be clearer: distrust in the system is a privilege reserved for those who run it.

There is a precedent that illuminates the mechanism perfectly. In the 1960s, de Gaulle began aggressively converting French reserves from dollars to gold, openly challenging Bretton Woods. The American response was not a debate: in 1971 Nixon closed the gold window and rewrote the rules unilaterally. Those who had bet on the stability of the old rules lost everything. Those who had written them rewrote them to suit themselves. Monetary transitions do not happen by consensus. They happen when those with the power to rewrite the rules decide the old ones no longer protect them.

Today US government debt has passed thirty-eight trillion dollars. Roughly twenty-three cents of every dollar of federal revenue goes to interest payments. Warsh's nomination signals the Fed may lose further independence from politics, precisely what markets fear most. JPMorgan wrote in black and white in 2025 that "increased polarisation in the US could jeopardise its governance, which underpins its role as a global safe haven". Goldman Sachs projects gold at 5,400 dollars by December 2026. JPMorgan at 6,300. UBS at 5,900. These are not fringe forecasters: they are the load-bearing pillars of the global financial system. They too, in their own way, are buying the lifeboat whilst explaining to passengers that the ship is sound.

What makes this transition different from every previous one is the speed at which it can accelerate. In the pre-digital world, reserve reallocations took years of discreet negotiations between ministries. Today the gold-Treasury crossover is public news, amplified and redistributed in real time to millions of decision-makers. Awareness itself becomes the catalyst. The more operators understand that central banks are rebalancing, the greater the pressure on Treasuries, the higher yields climb, the more US debt servicing costs rise, the stronger the original case for rebalancing becomes. A feedback loop that once triggered feeds on itself.

After the late January crash, gold reclaimed 5,000 dollars in under ten days. Official purchases did not slow. ETF inflows resumed. Two steps forward, one back, but the direction does not change. If over the next two quarters the price stabilises above 4,500 and official flows remain above 700 tonnes per year, the structural thesis holds. If the same central banks that accumulated begin liquidating, it was a bubble. For now every correction is absorbed, every dip is bought, and those who write the rules keep positioning as though those rules are about to expire.

This is not a story about gold. It is a story about the privilege of rule-makers: a privilege that in finance as in geopolitics follows the same pattern without exception. Rules are presented as universal and neutral; those who wrote them reserve the right to change them the moment they become inconvenient. The silent accumulation of gold by central banks is an admission no official communiqué will ever make: the system we built works, but perhaps not forever, and when it stops working we intend to be on the right side of the table. Everyone else is invited to keep trusting. At least until the rules change. Again.