Why Gold Didn't Actually Overtake Treasury Securities as the World's "Favorite" Reserve Asset

Colin Weiss
Additional contact information
Colin Weiss: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/colin-r-weiss.htm

No 2026-09-03-2, FEDS Notes from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: In 2025, world international reserves held in gold surpassed foreign official holdings of U.S. Treasury securities (figure 1), a fact drawing attention from media and policymakers (Nangle, 2025; European Central Bank, 2026; Storbeck and Hook, 2026, for example). Should this be interpreted as gold overtaking U.S. Treasury securities in its appeal as a reserve asset? I argue that the answer is no, as a comparison of world gold reserves and aggregate foreign official holdings of U.S. Treasury securities is problematic for a couple reasons.

Date: 2026-09-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds- ... -asset-20260903.html Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedgfn:103747

DOI: 10.17016/2380-7172.4147

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FEDS Notes from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier ().