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The Dutch central bank has shifted more than 78 tonnes of gold from New York to London in a politically sensitive move, citing “increasing geopolitical unrest”.
The transfer follows calls from European politicians and taxpayer lobbyists to repatriate gold reserves from the US, warning that an unreliable American government under President Donald Trump may otherwise seize them amid growing transatlantic tensions.
The Dutch central bank, known as the DNB, said the goal of the move was to strengthen its “crisis preparedness” by distributing its gold more evenly across jurisdictions.
“With this relocation, we have improved the tradeability of our gold reserves,” Dutch central bank governor Olaf Sleijpen said in a statement. London is the world’s largest trading hub for physical bullion, transacting more than $900bn in gold each week.
The move follows a similar decision by France, which removed all of its gold from the New York Federal Reserve between July 2025 and January 2026.
François Villeroy de Galhau, the governor of the French central bank at the time, said then that the move was not politically motivated.
Gold last year overtook US government bonds as the world’s largest reserve asset, according to ECB data, but some central banks are becoming increasingly skittish about storing gold in the US.
The Dutch central bank said its gold stored at the Bank of England met “modern international trade standards and is regarded as the world’s most easily tradeable gold.” In a situation of crisis, it would be more readily available than gold stored on a different continent, it added.
“We expect that we will never need to use them, but we do need to strengthen our resilience and preparedness,” Sleijpen said in the statement.
The move comes amid a historic rally in gold prices and a broader shift by central banks towards the precious metal. The price of gold has risen 25 per cent during the past 12 months and is currently around $4,364 per troy ounce.
The Dutch central bank, known as DNB, holds 612 tonnes of gold in total. It relocated 78 tonnes of gold from New York as well as 7 tonnes from Ottawa in Canada.
DNB only physically transferred 27 tonnes of gold from the US and Canada to Europe, selling the remainder in the Americas and buying new bullion in London. France employed a similar strategy for its transfer and netted an €11bn profit in the process.
DNB’s larger peer Bundesbank, which owns the second-largest gold reserves globally, decided to store half of its reserves at home in 2013, moving 674 tonnes of bullion from Paris and New York to its Frankfurt headquarters in a high-security operation that cost €7mn. Currently about a third of the Bundesbank’s gold reserves are stored in New York.
Bundesbank president Joachim Nagel earlier this year brushed off calls to repatriate more gold from the US. “I have no doubt that the gold is safely stored at the Federal Reserve in New York,” he told Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland in an interview in May, adding that the gold enjoyed a special legal status at the New York Fed.
“Eventually, the US would hurt itself most if it were to call that legal status into question in any way and thereby put the confidence of financial markets at risk,” he added.
