Since Russia's frozen reserves in February 2022, central banks have bought over 1,000 tonnes of gold yearly. Gold now makes up 27% of their assets versus 22% for US Treasuries, the first time gold has exceeded Treasuries in modern history. The shift reflects a move toward assets that can't be seized.
The central banks, they're doing something different. The central banks just keep on buying the physical gold no matter what. We're talking about over 1,000 tons per year. 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, a little bit less than 1,000 for Q1 of 2026. We're on pace to hit that number again. Now, one key date that's important is look when this really started, 2022. This is the date— February 2022, as a matter of fact— is when the West froze Russia's foreign exchange reserves. This was the moment where every central bank on Earth learned the same lesson the same day. A reserve that somebody else can freeze isn't a reserve, right? It's permission to use that money if they want to give it back to you. And so what did they do? They started buying gold. We want the gold in our central bank vaults. And they've been buying it, and they've been buying it, and they've been buying it from the price of $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000. Why? Because the price doesn't matter to them. They're not trading it. What they're doing is they're converting the US Treasuries into gold. And you can see where all that physical buying has taken us. We can see by the end of last year, the amount of physical gold being held at central banks up to 27%, while US Treasuries has dropped to 22%. For the first time in the modern era, the world's central banks hold more gold than US Treasuries. And that's not just my chart. Is from the European Central Bank, the ECB. In their own words, gold now surpasses both the euro and U.S. Treasuries.
