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For decades, the Federal Reserve’s vault in New York City was filled with gold owned by other sovereign central banks.
This vault is one of the most impressive and secure in the world.
From a 2005 article in the New York Times about gold:
“80 feet below street level, there is a vault that rests on the granite bedrock of Manhattan. ‘No man-made floor could hold the weight of all this,’ Peter Bakstansky, a Fed spokesman, assured me. The vault holds 7,000 tons of gold. This represents the world’s largest stash of the precious metal, and it is worth about $100 billion. To view it, you descend to an underground bunker and pass through a narrow passageway cut into a 90-ton steel cylinder.”
At the time the article was published, gold sold for just $420/oz. That 7,000 tonnes of gold sitting in the Fed’s vault would now be worth more than $1 trillion.
It would… except that in the intervening years since this Times piece was published, about 900 tonnes of the 7,000 has left the vault.
Most of the gold in the Fed’s vault is technically owned by foreign central banks. Most US gold is (reportedly) held in Ft. Knox.
But these central banks have been repatriating their gold for the past 20 years…
The first country to ask for their gold back was Venezuela. Hugo Chavez requested for Venezuela’s 160 tonnes of gold to be sent back home in 2011 and 2012.
He was successful, whereas his successor Nicolas Maduro tried to ask for gold back from the UK and was told no. That’s the real danger that underpins holding gold in a foreign vault. What do you do if they won’t give it back?
But Chavez kicked something off. From 2012 through just this week, countries have been draining their gold from the Fed vault.
France, Turkey, Germany, and the Netherlands have all asked for their gold back.
Just yesterday, the Netherlands announced that between MArch and August 2026, they had requested the return of 78.4 tonnes of gold from New York and Canada.
This past January is when France finally repatriated all of its remaining 129 tonnes of gold from the Fed vault.
Turkey took all of its gold back in 2018.
And between 2013 and 2017, Germany repatriated 300 tonnes of gold from New York.
Keep in mind: these are just the publicly disclosed gold moves from the Fed vault. We don’t know exactly how much gold left the vault.
But the question is raised: why are these countries asking for their gold back?
The Netherlands claimed it was for reasons of “crisis readiness” and improving marketability.
In a true crisis, you don’t want your gold in a vault an ocean away. You want it easily accessible. You don’t want to wait long enough for a crisis to hit to find out that the Fed has decided you shouldn’t get your gold back – as they did with Maduro, who now sits in a Brooklyn jail, only about a 20 minute drive in traffic to the Fed vaults in Manhattan where some of his country’s gold still lays 80 feet underground.
For our purposes as gold investors, we can view these moves as a sign that central banks are worried about the fidelity of the dollar ecosystem. It’s the same reason central banks have been buying gold for the past decade, and increasingly over the past few years.
The endgame is not clear. What is clear? The world’s biggest central banks all want to keep their gold close. It’s a matter of time before individual investors catch on…
But when they do, you’ll want to be an owner of the kinds of world class gold stocks I cover in my portfolios.
Best,
Garrett Goggin, CFA, CMT
Lead Analyst and Founder, Golden Portfolio
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