4th September 2026
For decades, there was something reassuring about knowing that some of Europe's most valuable national assets were sitting safely in American vaults.
Now that assumption is beginning to change.
The Netherlands has just moved 86 tonnes of its gold reserves out of New York and Ottawa and into London. The move took place between March and August this year and the Dutch central bank says it was prompted by increasing geopolitical unrest and the need to be better prepared for a serious crisis. London was chosen because gold held there can be traded more easily and accessed more quickly if circumstances demand it.
It is worth stopping for a moment to consider what that actually means.
This is not somebody moving a few gold bars from one warehouse to another. The Netherlands owns around 612 tonnes of gold, currently worth tens of billions of euros. Before the latest move, more than 31 per cent of Dutch gold was held in New York. That proportion has now fallen to about 18.5 per cent, while London's share has risen to more than 32 per cent.
And the Netherlands is not completely alone.
France has also been moving gold from the United States back towards Europe. Germany, which has one of the world's largest gold reserves, has faced political pressure to reconsider the large amount of its gold still held in New York, although the Bundesbank has so far defended the arrangement and says its American holdings are secure.
So why does any of this matter to ordinary people in Scotland?
Because gold is rather different from the way many of us probably think about it.
When most people hear the word gold they probably think of jewellery, coins, perhaps a gold sovereign inherited from a parent or grandparent, or the price quoted on the financial pages. But for central banks gold is something much more important.
It is a national reserve asset.
A government can issue bonds. It can hold dollars, euros, pounds or other currencies. It can own foreign government debt. But all of those assets ultimately involve another institution, government or financial system.
Gold is different.
A bar of gold does not require another government to honour a promise to pay. It does not mature. It does not default. It is not somebody else's liability.
That is one reason central banks have continued to hold it even after the world moved away from the gold standard.
And now they are buying more of it.
The World Gold Council's 2026 survey of central banks found that central banks have accumulated an average of around 1,000 tonnes of gold a year over the past four years, roughly twice the average annual accumulation during the previous decade. Eighty-nine per cent of those surveyed expect global central-bank gold holdings to increase over the next 12 months, while a record 45 per cent expect their own gold holdings to increase.
That is not the behaviour of institutions that regard gold as an old-fashioned relic.
They increasingly regard it as insurance.
And this brings us back to the Second World War.
There was a very good reason why so much European gold ended up in America in the first place.
In the years before and during the war, European governments faced the very real possibility that their countries could be invaded. Gold stored inside a country was potentially vulnerable to capture by an occupying power. Moving it abroad meant that even if a government lost control of its territory, it might still retain access to the financial resources represented by its gold.
America, protected by the Atlantic and not directly threatened with invasion, offered somewhere considerably safer.
The decision therefore made perfect sense.
Europe was becoming the battlefield.
America was becoming the safe haven.
Gold crossed the Atlantic.
That history is important because it explains why today's movements are so intriguing.
Nearly a century later, some European governments are once again asking themselves where their gold would be safest and most useful if the world entered a serious crisis.
But the nature of the risk has changed.
Nobody is seriously suggesting that Germany or the Netherlands expects American troops to occupy Europe. The concern is much more complicated. The world now has wars in Europe and the Middle East, increasing tensions between major powers, trade disputes, sanctions and growing uncertainty about the future of the international financial system.
And governments have learned something important from the treatment of Russia's foreign reserves.
Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Western governments froze enormous amounts of Russian financial assets held outside Russia.
That demonstrated that an asset held in another jurisdiction is not necessarily an asset that can always be accessed without question.
Gold itself is particularly attractive because it is not a liability of another country. But if your gold is physically stored in another country, you still have to think about jurisdiction, access, transport and the ability to trade it in an emergency.
That is where the Dutch decision becomes particularly revealing.
The Netherlands has not brought all its gold home.
Instead, it has moved a substantial amount from North America to London.
That tells us something important about what central banks actually want from their gold.
They don't necessarily want it sitting underneath the central bank's own building. They want it somewhere secure, internationally recognised and, if necessary, immediately usable.
London happens to be the world's great centre for the physical gold market. The Bank of England is also one of the world's major gold-storage locations.
The World Gold Council's 2026 survey found that the Bank of England was the most popular vaulting location among the central banks surveyed, with 57 per cent selecting it. Domestic storage came second, at 49 per cent. More importantly, 10 per cent of respondents said they had diversified the overseas locations of their gold during the previous 12 months, compared with just 2 per cent in the previous survey.
That is perhaps the most interesting figure of all.
It suggests that the Dutch decision is not simply an isolated Dutch decision.
Central banks are beginning to think about the geographical location of their gold in the same way that investors think about diversification.
Don't put everything in one place.
There is another reason for this growing interest in gold.
Central banks are increasingly worried about depending too heavily on any single currency, particularly the US dollar.
The dollar remains by far the world's most important reserve currency and there is no imminent replacement waiting around the corner. But central banks clearly see a benefit in having part of their reserves outside the conventional dollar-based financial system.
The World Gold Council's latest survey found that 74 per cent of respondents expect the US dollar's share of global reserves to be moderately or significantly lower over the next five years. At the same time, 84 per cent believe gold will account for a larger share of reserves over that period.
This does not mean the world is abandoning the dollar.
It means central banks want options.
And gold gives them one.
There is a fascinating irony here.
Gold was once regarded as something from an old financial world that had been replaced by modern currencies, government bonds and sophisticated financial markets.
Yet the more uncertain the world becomes, the more central banks seem to appreciate precisely the qualities that made gold valuable centuries ago.
It is scarce, it is durable and it is internationally recognised.
It does not depend upon the financial health of one particular government.
And when confidence in other things begins to weaken, people and governments tend to rediscover its value.
There is also an important distinction between the gold owned by a central bank and the gold owned by an individual.
If you own a gold sovereign, you own an asset whose value depends largely upon what somebody else is prepared to pay for it.
A central bank looks at gold differently. It is part of the country's emergency reserve. Its value is not simply the price quoted on the financial pages. Its strategic value comes from the fact that it can potentially be sold, pledged or exchanged internationally without relying on the creditworthiness of another government.
That is why central banks are prepared to spend billions accumulating it.
And it explains why the location of those bars matters.
Imagine a major international financial crisis. Currency markets are disrupted. Sanctions are imposed. International payments become difficult. Governments impose capital controls or financial restrictions.
In such circumstances, a reserve asset that can be accessed and traded quickly becomes extremely valuable.
The Dutch central bank has effectively said that it wants its gold positioned so that it can deploy it quickly if a crisis occurs.
That does not mean the Dutch expect such a crisis.
It means they do not want to discover during the crisis that they are not properly prepared for one.
There is an important lesson here for Britain as well.
The United Kingdom has its own enormous gold-storage operation through the Bank of England, which is one reason London is so attractive to other central banks. Britain therefore stands to benefit from this movement even while some European countries are reducing the amount of gold they keep in America.
But there is a much bigger question behind all of this.
For generations, Western countries operated on the assumption that the United States was the ultimate financial safe haven. European governments sent gold across the Atlantic because they trusted America to provide a secure refuge when Europe was threatened.
Now some of that gold is coming back.
Not because America has suddenly become unsafe, and not because central banks have decided that the dollar is finished.
Rather, governments are preparing for a world in which they can no longer assume that the international political and financial system will remain as stable as it was during much of the post-war period.
That is a subtle difference, but an important one.
The movement of gold is therefore less a vote against America than a vote for diversification.
And perhaps that is the biggest lesson ordinary savers can take from the story.
Gold has survived wars, revolutions, currency collapses, inflation, financial crises and political upheaval. Governments that once regarded it as an outdated monetary relic are now quietly buying more of it and reconsidering where it should be stored.
When central banks start behaving like this, it is worth paying attention.
They are not necessarily predicting a disaster.
They are simply making sure that, if one arrives, they have something of lasting value left in the vault.
And there is something almost poetic about the history.
The gold that Europe once sent to America to escape the Nazis is now, nearly 80 years later, beginning to move in the opposite direction.
The question is not whether history is repeating itself.
It clearly isn't.
The question is whether governments have decided that the next crisis may look sufficiently different from the last one that they need to prepare for it differently too.