🔥Gold officially dethrones U.S. Treasuries, becoming the world’s largest reserve asset

According to the ECB’s June 2026 report, gold accounts for 27% of the total official global foreign-exchange reserves as of the end of 2025, surpassing the 22% share of U.S. Treasury bonds for the first time since 1990.
After the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 (the U.S. stopped exchanging USD for gold), gold gradually lost its role as the main official monetary anchor.
At that time, European central banks (the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, the UK) began selling some of their gold in the 1980s and 1990s, viewing it as a “dead” asset that does not generate interest and incurs storage costs.
The peak event was Brown’s Bottom in 1999: UK Finance Minister Gordon Brown announced, ahead of a plan to sell 395 tons of gold (nearly half of the UK’s reserves) when the price was at a 20-year low ($282/oz). The gold market fell more than 13% in just three months.
The total amount of gold that central banks hold has exceeded the 36,000-ton threshold, approaching the reserve levels from the Bretton Woods era. The main driver comes not only from net purchases, but mainly from the revaluation effect: gold prices rose by about 60% in 2025 after already rising ~30% in 2024, causing the value of existing reserves to surge.