The People Who Print the Money Are Buying Gold

Somewhere in the world there is a building full of people who can create money by typing. No money printer, no permission slip, no upper limit. For fifteen years they have been spending some of that money on a metal that pays no interest, costs money to guard and has never once done anything except sit there being gold. It’s like a houseplant that never needs watering, never grows and somehow costs more every year.

Central banks are buying gold because it is the one reserve asset that is nobody else’s promise. They have been net buyers every year since 2010, and since 2022 at roughly double the old pace. Almost everything else in a central bank’s reserves is, in effect, a very large gift card: perfectly good money, as long as the store stays open and still wants your business. A bar of gold is the only thing in there that works without the store.

How they got here is a story told in two weekend press releases, a little over twenty-two years apart, both dated the 26th. Central banking, it turns out, does its most important work when everyone else is at brunch.

Wait, weren’t central banks selling gold?

They were, by the truckload. Weekend number one: Sunday, September 26, 1999. The European Central Bank and fourteen other European central banks, the Bank of England and the Swiss National Bank among them, put out a joint statement on gold. Point one, in full: “Gold will remain an important element of global monetary reserves.”

Point three explained how much of this important element they planned to sell. The answer was a lot, but politely. “Annual sales will not exceed approximately 400 tons and total sales over this period will not exceed 2,000 tons,” the statement said, the period being five years. It reads like a family announcing that Grandpa’s watch will always be central to the household, then putting a price sticker on it for the yard sale.

Fifteen of the most powerful financial institutions on earth, all holding the same thing, had sat down together and agreed to line up for the exit in single file, so nobody would get trampled.

Back then, the thinking was that gold was a relic. It paid nothing, it cost something to store, and a modern reserve manager could do better in government bonds, which paid interest and fit inside a computer. In gift-card terms, the central banks were trading cash for store credit because the store credit came with a bonus. Through the 1990s and 2000s the official sector was a reliable net seller, and almost nobody thought that was strange.

Then, in 2010, they flipped from selling to buying, and they have not flipped back. One year is a trade. Fifteen in a row is a policy. And in 2022 the policy suddenly doubled in size, which brings us to weekend number two.

Why do central banks want gold rather than bonds?

Ask a reserve manager and you’ll get the list, recited like the safety talk before takeoff: diversification, inflation hedging, long-term store of value, performance in a crisis. All true, all in the surveys, and none of it explains the timing. Every item on that list was just as available in 2005, when the same institutions were still lined up for the exit.

So here is the timing. On Saturday, February 26, 2022, two days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Western leaders issued a joint statement promising to “prevent the Russian Central Bank from deploying its international reserves.” They meant it. Western governments went on to immobilize roughly $300 billion of those reserves (estimates run from $280 billion to $330 billion).

Most of it wasn’t gold. It was bonds in euros and dollars, held abroad in other people’s ledgers, and about $200 billion of it sat with a single firm, Euroclear, in Belgium. One weekend those bonds were reserves. By the next they were a legal dispute.

In gift-card terms, the card was declined at the register, and the store kept the card. You don’t have to take any side in that war to see what every other reserve manager on earth saw that week. Gold is the only reserve asset that is not simultaneously somebody else’s liability.

A Treasury bond is a promise from a government. A euro deposit is a promise from a bank and, behind it, a central bank. A reserve held abroad is an entry in a foreign ledger, and entries in ledgers can be frozen, sanctioned, redenominated or just argued about. “Redenominated” is a lovely word. It means the number on your statement has become a different number, and nobody asked you.

Every reserve asset in the world is somebody’s IOU, except one. That property is worth nothing at all for decades at a stretch. Then one Saturday it’s worth everything, and reserve managers are paid to think about Saturdays.

(“Folks, this is your captain. We are experiencing a counterparty event. Passengers holding bonds, please stay in your seats while we try to find them. Passengers holding gold, please continue doing nothing. We apologize for the lack of inconvenience.”)

How much gold are central banks buying, year by year?

Here is the official sector’s shopping list since it stopped holding yard sales:

• 2010 to 2021: an average of 473 tonnes a year, and a net purchase in every one of them.
• 2022: 1,082 tonnes. A record at the time, roughly double the decade before.
• 2023: 1,037 tonnes.
• 2024: 1,092.4 tonnes. The record now.
• 2025: 863.3 tonnes. Below a thousand for the first time in four years, and still nearly double the 2010 to 2021 average. In most industries that would be called a slowdown. In this one it’s called a diet, the kind where you still order the large pizza but leave two slices in the box.
• First half of 2026: 345 tonnes, of which 288.9 arrived in the second quarter alone.

Three years over a thousand tonnes, then a year that was merely enormous. Then the quietest first quarter since 2022, followed right away by a second quarter running 62% ahead of the same quarter a year before. Anybody who draws a smooth line through that is trying to sell you a ruler. What the numbers do show is fifteen straight years on the same side of the same trade, and a step up that arrives the same year as the frozen gift cards.

How big is 1,092 tonnes of gold?

Tonnes are a sneaky unit for gold, because gold is ridiculously dense. A tonne of it isn’t a truckload. It’s a cube about 15 inches on a side, a footstool you could rest your feet on. In 2024 central banks bought roughly three of those a day, Sundays included: one new footstool of gold about every eight hours, all year.

Now stack the whole year in one place. The 2024 total, 1,092.4 tonnes, makes a solid cube about 12 and a half feet, or 3.8 meters, on a side. It would fit in a small bedroom. It would also go straight through the bedroom floor, then the floor below that, and come to rest in the basement, which is where this website would have put it anyway.

At gold’s price on October 24, 2026, about $3,997 an ounce, that cube is worth about $140 billion. That’s real money, and also a rounding error on the balance sheets doing the buying.

Any central bank planning to repeat 2024 should consult a structural engineer. Possibly two, because the first one will take a look at the drawings and ask to be paid in footstools.

What are central banks buying gold instead of?

For fifty years the answer was obvious: US Treasury securities, which pay interest, settle in a keystroke and come by the trillion. They are the finest gift card ever printed, issued by the biggest store in the mall.

Try this at home. You have a savings account that pays interest and can be checked from your phone. You decide instead to buy a large rock, keep it in the garage and pay a neighbor to watch it. Your family will have questions. Your neighbor will have a rate.

And yet here is how the world’s official reserves were split at the end of 2025, at market value, according to the European Central Bank’s annual review:

• Gold: 27%
• US Treasuries: 22%
• The euro, in every form it comes in: 15%

Central banks now hold more of their reserves in a metal than in the debt of the largest economy on earth. That hasn’t been true since the Bretton Woods system ended. This is real. The institution that reported it is itself a central bank, and it reported it in the tone of a school secretary reading the lost-and-found list over the PA.

The ECB is also plain that the crossover is mostly arithmetic. The gold price rose about 30% in 2024 and about 60% in 2025, which lifts gold’s share of any portfolio holding it whether or not anyone buys another ounce. If the tomatoes in your garden outgrow the lettuce, you didn’t plant more tomatoes. You just have a lot of tomatoes, and a decision to make about salsa.

Which brings us to China, because it always does

China’s reported holdings of US Treasuries, from the Treasury’s own monthly survey of who owns its debt:

• December 2015: $1,270.5 billion. The peak.
• December 2024: $759.0 billion.
• December 2025: $684.4 billion.

Roughly half, gone in a decade. Over the same decade the People’s Bank of China has been among the largest reported buyers of gold in the world, and it bought another 33 tonnes in the second quarter of 2026.

The tempting headline is China is dumping Treasuries to buy gold, and it needs one asterisk. The survey counts bonds by where they’re held, not by who owns them. Move Treasuries from a custodian in New York to one in Brussels and they vanish from China’s line and turn up on Belgium’s, without changing hands at all. It’s like moving your couch into a storage unit and being counted, from that day on, as a person who owns no couch.

Even with the asterisk, the pattern is clear. The second largest economy on earth has spent ten years shrinking its reported pile of the largest one’s IOUs while buying the one asset that isn’t an IOU. It has never felt the need to explain why. Since that Saturday in 2022, it hasn’t really needed to.

And China isn’t just shopping. It is building a gold market of its own: a gold price in yuan, a vault in Hong Kong and a system there to settle the trades.

Into the weeds: China’s own gold market

In September 2026 the People’s Bank of China reported its 23rd straight month of gold buying, for an official total of 77.47 million ounces, about 2,410 tonnes. Meanwhile the Shanghai Gold Exchange has published its own gold price, in yuan per gram, since 2016, and in June 2025 it opened its first vault outside the mainland, in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has promised room for more than 2,000 tonnes within three years, and in July 2026 it switched on a government-owned clearing system to settle the trades.

Some analysts think the official numbers are on the low side. Société Générale estimated that China really bought about 250 tonnes in 2025, ten times what it reported. That’s an estimate from trade data, not a confession. Either way, most of the world is still holding gift cards to somebody else’s store. China is building a store of its own, with its own price tag, its own cash register and its own vault in the back. So far it stocks one item.

Where do central banks keep their gold?

The lesson of 2022 raises an awkward follow-up. Plenty of central banks keep their gold abroad too, in the vaults of the Bank of England or the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, because that’s where gold gets traded. A bar in somebody else’s basement is still a bar. It just has a landlord.

Poland, the biggest buyer of 2025, had settled that question back in 2019, the way you settle it with a lawnmower you lent the neighbors. It went and got it. According to the National Bank of Poland’s own account, 100 tonnes of Polish gold left the Bank of England by air, in eight transports of 1,000 bars each. British police, Polish police, the Border Guard and airport staff were all in on it, and every bar was checked and registered as it entered the vault at home. Each flight carried about 12.5 tonnes of gold, roughly the weight of an empty city bus, which is not a thing anyone wants to hit turbulence with.

Eight thousand bars, flown across Europe, to sit in a different room doing exactly what they had done in the old one. Which was nothing, except belonging to Poland without needing anybody else’s cooperation, like bringing your lawn mower back from the neighbor’s shed. It doesn’t mow any better. You just don’t have to knock anymore.

Could central banks stop buying gold?

This is the bear case for our own position, stated plainly. The buying is concentrated: seven countries, led by Poland, did about 36% of the 2025 buying, and two buyers did more than a quarter of the second quarter of 2026. It has slowed: 2025 came in 21% below 2024, and 2026 opened with a first quarter of just 57 tonnes. And the same institutions sold gold near multi-decade lows in the late 1990s, with the same conviction they now bring to buying it. Central banks aren’t smart money. They’re large money, which is a different thing.

Into the weeds: who bought, and how much

In 2025 the seven largest reported buyers were Poland at 102 tonnes, Kazakhstan 57, Brazil 43, Azerbaijan 38, Turkey 27, China 27 and the Czech Republic 20, about 36% of the total between them. The same names lead in 2026: Poland took 51 tonnes in the second quarter and China 33. The World Gold Council’s own read in July 2026 was that the year remained on course to be strong but probably below 2025. Lumpy, then, and not a straight line up.

But notice what none of those objections touches: the reason. A slow year of buying is still nearly double the old average. A short list of buyers who come back year after year is what every diner in America calls regulars: same booth, same eggs, same time every morning, and the waitress starts pouring the coffee before they sit down. And the sellers of 1999 were giving away the exact property the buyers of the 2020s are paying for, which was never the shine. It was being nobody’s promise.

What does central bank gold buying tell the rest of us?

None of this is a recommendation. It’s a description of what the largest holders of money on earth are doing with theirs. For fifteen years running, more of them have decided that some part of their savings shouldn’t depend on anybody else keeping a promise, and they’ve expressed that decision in the only asset that qualifies.

It’s the same reasoning, scaled up by a few thousand tonnes, as the person who keeps a handful of gold coins in a drawer at home. The gift card in the wallet is more convenient. It also needs the store, and the store, as of one Saturday in 2022, has a policy on returns.

The people who can create money by typing have spent fifteen years buying the one thing they can’t type. They have the fastest keyboards on earth, and they’re still paying full price for footstools and asking to have them delivered to their own basement.

Sources

• 2025 and 2024 tonnage, the 2010 turn to net buying, the 473-tonne 2010–2021 average and the 2025 country breakdown: World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends, full year 2025.
• First-quarter and second-quarter 2026 tonnage, the 62% year-on-year comparison, the 2026 country breakdown, end-June holdings for China and Poland, the central bank survey results and the full-year view: World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends, Q2 2026, published July 30, 2026.
• The end-2025 split of global official reserves — gold 27%, US Treasuries 22%, the euro 15% — and the statement that the shift is largely a price effect: European Central Bank, The international role of the euro, June 2026.
• China’s Treasury holdings for December 2015, 2024 and 2025: US Department of the Treasury, Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities. On why that series understates ownership, see Council on Foreign Relations, Finding China in the US TIC Data.
• 2022 and 2023 tonnage: World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends, full year 2023. The Council revises these totals as late reporting arrives, so the 2022 and 2023 figures above are as first published and the 2024 and 2025 figures are as they stood in the 2025 report — which is why 2024 now sits above what was called a record in 2022.
• The gold price used for the dollar conversion is $3,997 an ounce, indicative spot from gold-api.com on October 24, 2026; every tool on this site shows today’s price.

Figures read September 24, 2026; the dollar value of the 2024 cube was recalculated at $3,997 an ounce on October 24, 2026; the end-June holdings and the answers in the questions below were checked October 3, 2026. Central bank tonnage is revised for months after a quarter closes, so every number here names the report it came from.

Questions people actually ask

How much gold did central banks buy in 2025?

Central banks bought a net 863.3 tonnes of gold in 2025, according to the World Gold Council. That was 21% below the 1,092.4 tonnes bought in 2024, but still far above the 2010 to 2021 average of 473 tonnes a year.

How much gold have central banks bought in 2026?

345 tonnes in the first half of 2026, according to the World Gold Council — the lowest first half since 2022. That total hides a sharp split: 57 tonnes in the first quarter and 288.9 tonnes in the second, which was 62% above the second quarter of 2025. Poland and China led the second-quarter buying with 51 and 33 tonnes.

When did central banks start buying gold instead of selling it?

2010. Before that, the official sector had been a reliable net seller for years, particularly in Europe. Central banks have been net buyers every year since.

Are central banks selling US Treasuries to buy gold?

Not straightforwardly. At the end of 2025 gold made up 27% of global official reserves against 22% for US Treasuries, according to the European Central Bank — but the ECB attributes that crossover mainly to the gold price, which rose about 30% in 2024 and about 60% in 2025. China’s reported Treasury holdings have fallen from $1,270.5 billion in December 2015 to $684.4 billion in December 2025 while it bought gold, though the Treasury’s survey counts securities by where they are held rather than who owns them, so part of that decline is custody moving rather than selling.

Why do central banks want gold rather than bonds?

Gold is the only major reserve asset that is not also somebody else’s liability. A bond is a promise from a government and a foreign currency deposit is an entry in another country’s ledger; both can be frozen, sanctioned or disputed. A bar in your own vault requires nobody else to be solvent or cooperative.

Which central banks bought the most gold in 2025?

Poland led with 102 tonnes, followed by Kazakhstan at 57, Brazil at 43, Azerbaijan at 38, Turkey and China at 27 each, and the Czech Republic at 20. Those seven made up roughly 36% of the year’s total, so the buying is considerably more concentrated than headlines usually suggest.

How much gold does China’s central bank hold?

The People’s Bank of China held 2,346 tonnes of gold at the end of June 2026, according to the World Gold Council, after adding 33 tonnes in the second quarter. Poland’s central bank, the other large buyer that quarter, held 632 tonnes after adding 51. These are reported official holdings, and countries sometimes report with a lag.

Will central banks keep buying gold?

Central banks say they intend to. In the World Gold Council’s latest central bank survey, reported in its Q2 2026 review, 89% of respondents expected global central bank gold reserves to rise over the next year, and a record 45% expected to increase their own. A survey measures intentions, not purchases, and the buying has been lumpy: 2025 came in 21% below 2024.

How big is a tonne of gold?

A tonne of gold is a solid cube about 15 inches on a side, roughly the size of a footstool, because gold is so dense. The 1,092.4 tonnes central banks bought in 2024 would make a cube about 12 and a half feet, or 3.8 meters, on a side, worth about $140 billion at gold's October 24, 2026 price of $3,997 an ounce. Our weight tool draws it to scale.

What reasons do central banks give for holding gold?

In World Gold Council surveys, central banks cite reserve diversification, protection against geopolitical and financial-market uncertainty, and gold’s role as a long-term store of value. Those are all true, but they do not explain the timing of the buying since 2010. The operative difference is that gold is the only major reserve asset that is not also somebody else’s liability.

Did freezing Russia's reserves make central banks buy more gold?

The timing fits. In February 2022 Western governments immobilized roughly $300 billion of the Russian central bank's reserves, mostly euro and dollar bonds held abroad, according to Brookings. Central bank gold buying that year hit a then-record 1,082 tonnes. Gold held in a country's own vault cannot be frozen by a foreign custodian.

Did central banks use to sell gold?

Yes. Through the 1990s and 2000s central banks were net sellers. On September 26, 1999, the European Central Bank and fourteen other European central banks agreed to cap their combined sales at about 400 tons a year and 2,000 tons over five years. They became net buyers in 2010 and have bought every year since.

Is China buying more gold than it reports?

Possibly, but nobody outside Beijing knows for sure. Officially, the People’s Bank of China reported 23 straight months of gold purchases through September 2026, for a total of about 2,410 tonnes. Analysts at Société Générale and Goldman Sachs have estimated from trade data that China’s real purchases run several times the reported figures. Those are estimates, and China has not confirmed them.