The New York Federal Reserve acts as the guardian and custodian of gold on behalf of account holders, including the U.S. UU. Governments, foreign governments, other central banks and official international organizations. However, the WGC points out that the economic and geopolitical uncertainty linked to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian war in Ukraine may be creating a “gap” between central bank respondents from advanced economies and those from developed and emerging market economies.
Read on to learn about the top 10 countries according to central bank gold holding, according to WGC data. Like Germany, Italy also stores parts of its offshore reserves. In total, 141.2 tons are found in the United Kingdom, 149.3 in Switzerland and 1,061 in the United States Federal Reserve. Italy is home to 1,100 tons of gold nationwide.
Most of the yellow metal is in the form of large, variable-weight standard gold ingots that weigh between 10 and 14 kilograms. There are also smaller bars on site that weigh up to 1 kilogram each. The Swiss National Bank holds the central bank's seventh-largest gold reserve. Its 1,040 tons of gold are owned by the Swiss state, but the central bank manages and maintains the reserve.
Rounding out this list of the main central bank gold reserves is the National Bank of the Netherlands (DNB), the central bank of the Netherlands. Like Switzerland, the Dutch central bank stores up to 38 percent of its gold in Canada's national reserve. Another 31 percent, in the form of 15,000 gold ingots, is in a national vault, while the remaining 31 percent is in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Since 1944, the International Monetary Fund has added gold by paying member countries' debts.
Countries can also exchange gold for the currency of another member country. A gold reserve is gold held by a national central bank, primarily intended to guarantee the reimbursement of payment promises to depositors and banknote holders (p. e.g. Paper money), or its trading pairs, during the era of the gold standard, and also as a store of value or to support the value of the national currency.
Holdings of gold in a vault do not earn interest. To earn some ongoing income, the Reserve Bank can lend its gold. For more than 30 years, the RBA has participated in the gold lending market and has sometimes lent almost all of its gold holdings (chart). Over the past decade, RBA's gold lending activity has been lower.
The reduction in hedging demands of gold producers, combined with a greater willingness of other investors to lend their gold, has reduced the available return on gold loans. The gold reserve held by the Treasury Department is partially offset by the obligation for gold certificates issued to Federal Reserve banks at the legal rate, which the Treasury can exchange at any time. The Reserve Bank revalues gold holds (including loaned gold) daily to the equivalent in Australian dollars at the fixed price of the LBMA at 3 p.m., and revaluation gains and losses are transferred to an asset revaluation reserve on the RBA's balance sheet. A gold reserve is the gold held by a national central bank, mainly intended to guarantee the reimbursement of payment promises to depositors, to banknote holders (e.g.
The Reserve Bank has processes to ensure that its specified gold bars are properly maintained. Banca d'Italia, the national bank of Italy, began accumulating gold in 1893, when three different financial institutions merged into one. The Bank of Russia stores two-thirds of its gold reserves in a bank building in Moscow and the remaining third in St. Petersburg.
The commercial relations that the Reserve Bank maintains with participants in the gold market are confidential; the same applies to commercial relations used in the management of other official reserve assets. In 1941, the French authorities in Vichy organized the transportation of 4,944 boxes containing 198 tons of gold to German Reichsbank officials, and the German Government used them to purchase products and ammunition from neutral countries. And for the second year in a row, no respondent indicated that their institution plans to reduce its gold holds. The RBA requires that the redelivery of the gold it has lent be carried out through a physical delivery of the gold to the account assigned to the RBA at the Bank of England (which can be done by means of an annotated transfer of gold bullion book serial numbered from an account assigned to the Bank of England to the RBA's assigned account at the Bank of England).
In addition, the Reserve Bank audits its gold-related processes, including gold holds at the Bank of England. Like many of the central banks on this list, the German national bank stores more than half of its shares in foreign locations in New York, London and France. The gold listed for each of the countries in the table may not be physically stored in the country listed, since central banks have generally not allowed independent audits of their reserves. .
.
