The Netherlands has become the latest country to pull gold out of the United States in recent years, as the Dutch Central Bank announced on Wednesday that it was moving 86 tons of its reserves from New York and Canada to London, citing “increasing geopolitical unrest.” “This makes it the quickest for DNB to deploy in a crisis situation,” De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) said in a statement. Before the move, the Dutch bank held 31.3 percent of its gold in New York and 19.7 percent in Ottawa. Now both hold 18.5 percent of the country’s gold reserve, while London’s share has grown from 18.1 percent to 32.1 percent.
Another 30.8 percent of DNB’s gold is in the Netherlands. It is the second European country this year to remove its gold reserves from the United States, after France did the same in January. The Banque de France sold 129 tons of gold which had been held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York between July 2025 and January 2026, about 5 percent of its total reserves.
With the money it made from the sale, the bank purchased an equivalent amount of new, compliant gold in Europe, which now sits in Paris alongside the rest of France’s reserves, which totals around 2,437 tons. It is not a completely new phenomenon. In the summer of 2017, under the first Trump administration, Germany’s Bundesbank completed the transfer of 300 tons of its gold from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to Frankfurt.
The move was part of the German bank’s plan to have the majority of the country’s gold reserves stored in German vaults in Frankfurt. While 36.6 percent of its gold stock remained in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, all the 374 tons of gold in France’s Banque de France was pulled out. Last year, Germany and another European country - Italy - resisted growing domestic and political pressure to repatriate approximately $245 billion worth of gold stored in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s vaults after trade tensions and concerns over U.S. monetary policy under President Donald Trump.
The two countries hold the world’s second- and third-largest gold reserves at 3,352 tons and 2,452 tons, respectively. Italy holds roughly one-third in New York. The single largest holder is the United States, which holds 8,133 tons of gold.
Under President Hugo Chavez, Venezuela repatriated about 160 tons of its gold reserves from foreign banks, including the United States and Europe, back to Caracas by January 2012. This is a developing story and will be updated.
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