A gold warning is flashing red. Is a new global crisis taking shape?

The Dutch central bank has moved a quarter of the gold it held in North America to London, and it has given an unusually blunt reason for doing so -- increasing geopolitical unrest. De Nederlandsche Bank, or DNB, says the operation will make its reserves easier to deploy if a crisis strikes. The bank has not said what crisis it is preparing for, but central banks do not normally invoke geopolitical risk when making routine changes to the custody of their reserves. Of course, DNB may not be predicting an imminent war or suggesting that the US will seize Dutch gold. Nevertheless, it has said the step is aimed at crisis preparedness. Central banks are becoming less willing to assume that current geopolitical and financial arrangements can withstand the next crisis.

The Dutch gold move

DNB has 612.4 tonnes of gold, valued at €72.2 billion at the end of 2025. Until recently, 31.3% of it was held in New York and 19.7% in Ottawa. Between March and August, DNB shifted about 86 tonnes from those two locations to London. New York and Ottawa now each account for 18.5% of its total gold while London holds roughly 32%.


The operation was not a straightforward physical repatriation. Only 27 tonnes were physically brought from North America to DNB's secure vault near Zeist before a similar quantity was moved to London. The other roughly 59 tonnes were sold in New York and replaced with gold purchased in London.

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DNB's stated reason is access rather than distrust of the vaults themselves. London is the world's principal wholesale gold market. The Bank of England says it holds around 400,000 gold bars and provides custody services to central banks and other institutions. Gold stored there can be traded by transferring ownership of the bars without physically moving them. DNB says this makes London-held gold the quickest to deploy in a crisis.

But there is another part of DNB's explanation that should not be lost in the technical detail. The bank specifically linked the relocation to geopolitical unrest and "crisis preparedness". That is not merely a statement about the efficiency of the London bullion market. It is an admission that the central bank is reassessing what could prevent its reserves from being used when they are needed.

Why the wording matters

Central banks are generally careful institutions. They do not usually rearrange sovereign reserves and then publicly attach such a decision to geopolitical risk unless that risk has become part of their operational planning.

DNB has not identified a specific threat. There is no indication that it expects the US to confiscate Dutch assets or that it has received intelligence about an impending military confrontation. But the absence of a named crisis should not obscure what the bank has actually said.

It believes that geopolitical conditions have deteriorated enough to justify changing the location of its gold. A central bank does not have to expect a crisis to be imminent to prepare for one. It has to decide that the probability and potential cost of a disruption are high enough to warrant action before the disruption occurs.

And gold is precisely the asset a central bank would want available in an extreme crisis. It can be sold, pledged or exchanged for liquidity without relying on the creditworthiness of another institution.

DNB is therefore reducing the vulnerability of having too much of an emergency reserve sitting far from the market in which it can most readily be monetised.

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The geopolitical backdrop is hard to ignore

The decision comes at a particularly uncomfortable moment for Western alliances. The US is fighting Iran in a conflict that has already shaken energy markets. Renewed US-Iran military tensions are again pushing oil and gold higher.

At the same time, relations between Washington and some of its traditional allies have become more transactional. The US has imposed sweeping tariffs while its dispute with Canada has escalated. Europe is dealing with the continuing war in Ukraine while debating how much of its defence architecture can safely depend on the US.

None of this proves that these developments caused DNB's decision. The relocation was carried out between March and August and DNB has not attributed it to any particular conflict. But the timing makes the bank's reference to geopolitical unrest difficult to dismiss.

The financial system has become another arena of geopolitical competition. The freezing of Russian central-bank reserves after the invasion of Ukraine demonstrated that reserves held in foreign jurisdictions can become inaccessible even when their underlying ownership has not changed.

That experience has been particularly important for central banks because foreign-exchange reserves are supposed to be liquid assets available in an emergency. If political action can make them unusable, then the question of where an asset is held becomes part of reserve management.

The Russian reserves changed the meaning of 'safe'

The freezing of Russian reserves in 2022 was the watershed. Western governments immobilised hundreds of billions of dollars of Russian central-bank assets held in Western financial institutions. The action was unprecedented in scale and forced other reserve managers to confront a problem that had received relatively little attention before then.

An asset can be perfectly liquid in normal times yet inaccessible during a geopolitical rupture. Gold offers an alternative. Allocated physical bullion is not a liability of another government and does not require another sovereign to honour a promise. This is one reason central banks have sharply increased their gold purchases since 2022.

The World Gold Council says central banks have accumulated roughly 1,000 tonnes of gold a year on average over the past four years, about twice the annual average of the preceding decade. Its 2026 survey found that 89% of reserve managers expect global central-bank gold holdings to rise over the next year. Forty-five percent expect their own gold holdings to increase.

DNB's move is slightly different from simply buying more gold. It is asking where existing gold should be located so that it remains usable when geopolitical conditions are at their worst. That is a more pointed form of risk management.

There is also a precedent close to home. The Banque de France removed its remaining 129 tonnes of gold from the New York Federal Reserve between July 2025 and January 2026. Rather than physically shipping every bar, it sold the bullion in New York and bought replacement gold in Europe. French officials said the move was not politically motivated. Yet the result was that France no longer had gold stored at the New York Fed.

DNB has stopped well short of that. It still has 18.5% of its total gold in New York and the same proportion in Ottawa. Germany has taken a different position. About a third of the Bundesbank's gold remains in New York. President Joachim Nagel said in May that he had no doubt the gold was safe at the Federal Reserve and pointed to the special legal protection surrounding it.

There is no evidence of a coordinated European decision to pull gold out of America. But there is evidence of individual central banks becoming more interested in geographic diversification.

India too moved its gold back home

India has been doing something broadly similar, though in the opposite direction to DNB's latest move. The Reserve Bank of India has been steadily bringing gold held overseas, mainly with the Bank of England and the Bank for International Settlements, back to its domestic vaults. It moved more than 100 tonnes from the UK to India in the first half of 2024 and another 102 tonnes in October, while a further 104 tonnes was repatriated between October 2025 and March 2026. As a result, the share of the RBI's gold held overseas fell from about 55% in March 2023 to 22% by March 2026.

The RBI has not presented the transfers as a response to any particular geopolitical threat, and the distinction from DNB is important: India has been increasing the amount of bullion under domestic custody, while DNB's latest operation is primarily about shifting the location of existing reserves to improve access and diversify storage.

Gold's behaviour shows the market has changed too

The gold market has been responding to many of the same concerns. In a recent Financial Times column, UBS chief strategist Bhanu Baweja said that the gold bull market that began in 2018 has become structurally different from earlier rallies. The crucial break, he says, came in 2022 when Western governments froze Russia's foreign-exchange reserves.

US five-year real yields rose by more than four percentage points between March 2022 and October 2023. Historically that should have caused gold to fall dramatically. Instead, it rose about 7%. During the following two years, real yields fell by less than one percentage point while gold surged 110%.

The argument is that gold is no longer responding mainly to interest rates. Reserve managers and investors are increasingly assigning it a value as protection against geopolitical and financial-system risk.

The deterioration in US public finances is another factor. US government debt is already about $32 trillion and he expects it to rise by a similar amount over the coming decade. Growing concern about fiscal sustainability, he argues, is becoming an increasingly important driver of gold through higher bond-market term premiums.

The implication is significant for DNB. The bank's decision is not taking place in isolation from the gold market. Both reflect a world in which investors and reserve managers are placing greater value on assets that remain useful when confidence in institutions or governments is under pressure.

Goldman expects the gold rally to continue

Goldman Sachs Research expects this trend to keep supporting prices. In its August 28 analysis, Goldman raised its forecast for gold to $4,900 an ounce by the end of 2026, from $4,600 previously. It expects central banks to purchase an average of 50 tonnes a month this year, compared with only 17 tonnes a month before 2022.

Goldman's estimate of central-bank buying reached 100 tonnes a month in June on a three-month seasonally adjusted basis. China was the largest identifiable buyer.

The Goldman Sachs analysts say central banks are accumulating gold as a multi-year strategy to diversify their reserves and hedge geopolitical and financial risks. They also argue that recent developments, including the Iran conflict, could encourage private investors to diversify into gold if confidence in Western fiscal sustainability weakens.

There is another force at work. Investors are increasingly using gold options to hedge against large policy shifts. Goldman says dealer hedging can amplify price moves as options approach key strike prices. That could push gold beyond its $4,900 forecast, although it also means sharper reversals are possible.