Europe Is Debating Whether to Bring Its Gold Home From New York, and Portugal Quietly Finished That Job in 2021

The Netherlands has just moved almost 100 tonnes of gold out of North America, and in doing so it has restarted an argument that runs through half of Europe: should a central bank keep its bullion on the other side of the Atlantic at all? Portugal is one of the few countries with nothing to decide, because it took its last bar out of New York five years ago.

De Nederlandsche Bank, the Dutch central bank, disclosed that over recent months it shifted gold worth close to ten billion dollars out of the United States and Canada. Around 60 tonnes travelled physically, half to the bank's own secure facilities and half to the Bank of England in London. The rest was handled on paper: the bank sold gold in North American markets and bought the same value in London. New York and Ottawa now hold 18.5 percent each of the Dutch stock, down from 31.3 and 19.7 percent, while England holds about 32 percent and the Netherlands itself about 30.

The governor, Olaf Sleijpen, framed it as readiness rather than politics: "with this reallocation we have improved the transactionality of our gold reserves," he said. "We believe we will never need to use them, but we need to improve our resilience and preparedness."

Where Portugal keeps its 382.6 tonnes

Portugal is a heavyweight in this market for a country of its size, sitting consistently inside the world's top 20 holders. The stock has not changed since September 2006, the last time the Banco de Portugal (Bank of Portugal) sold, under the old Central Banks Gold Agreement. It has not bought since either.

According to the most recent official information, reported by ECO, roughly 45 percent of that gold sits on Portuguese soil in Banco de Portugal facilities, about 48 percent is held at the Bank of England, and small residual shares sit at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel and at the Banque de France. ECO puts the value of the holding at more than 45 billion euros at the end of 2025.

The last movement was in 2021, and the central bank described it in its own activity report for that year: "The gold held at the Federal Reserve of New York, totalling 3.7 tonnes, was transferred to the Banque de France. This transfer was carried out with the aim of improving the profitability of the gold held abroad and moving its location into the Eurosystem."

Why everyone else is suddenly asking

Analysts give two sets of reasons. One is prosaic: gold at the Bank of England is considered the most readily tradable, and therefore the quickest to reach in a crisis, while holdings in New York and Ottawa cannot be mobilised as directly. The other is geopolitical. The freezing of Russian assets abroad after the invasion of Ukraine showed that ownership of reserves is respected until it is not, and Washington's willingness to lean on other countries, and on the independence of its own Federal Reserve, has made custody a live question.

Germany moved more than 600 tonnes home from New York between 2013 and 2017, and the subject has resurfaced without any official strategy attached. In Italy, where roughly 43 percent of reserves are thought to sit in the United States, civil society voices are pressing for repatriation and the government has stayed quiet. Together, the two are estimated to hold close to 250 billion euros of gold in New York. Spain does not disclose locations at all, and France brought its New York holding back in January, citing technical rather than political reasons.

What this means for residents

• It is not a rainy-day fund. The Banco de Portugal has consistently refused to treat the gold as something to be sold in a crisis, including during the pandemic. Nothing in the current debate changes that.
• It does move the national accounts. Gold's appreciation feeds the central bank's balance sheet and, through it, the dividend the bank pays the State. That is money that ends up in the same budget as everything else.
• Portugal's position is unusually settled. With nothing left at the Federal Reserve and roughly half the stock at home, there is no repatriation decision waiting to be taken here.

The Dutch move will keep the argument alive in Berlin, Rome and Madrid for months. In Lisbon it is a question already answered, quietly, in a single line of a five-year-old annual report. For a country whose public debt dominates every conversation about the national balance sheet, the gold is the one asset nobody proposes to touch.