Why countries still keep gold

3 min read · Updated 1 October 2026

Eighty feet below the streets of Manhattan, on solid bedrock, there's a vault holding around half a million gold bars. Most of it doesn't belong to America. It belongs to other countries' central banks. They keep it there, and hardly ever touch it.

This is Countries Compared. Today: in a world of digital money, why do countries still keep tons of gold? And who has the most?

To understand it, we need to go back to a promise.

In 1944, at Bretton Woods, the world's major currencies were tied to the U.S. dollar, and the dollar was tied to gold. 35 dollars for one ounce. Governments could hand in dollars and get gold. But by the 1960s, there were far more dollars abroad than gold in America's vaults. On the 15th of August 1971, President Nixon closed that window. Since then, money hasn't been backed by gold. It's backed by trust.

You'd expect central banks to have sold their gold after that. They didn't. Central banks still hold around 39,000 tons. That's about a fifth of all the gold above ground.

So who has the most?

The United States, by far. More than 8,000 tons. Then Germany, Italy and France. Together, these four hold about two fifths of all official gold. Then Russia and China. And many analysts believe China holds more than it officially reports.

For some countries, gold is almost everything. For the U.S., Germany, Italy and France, it's well over two thirds of their reserves at today's prices. For China and Japan, it's only around a tenth. They hold mostly foreign currencies and bonds instead.

So why keep it at all?

First, gold is nobody's promise. A bond is only worth something if someone pays it back. A bar of gold is just a bar of gold. Second, nobody can print more of it. Third, it tends to hold its value in a crisis. And fourth, it isn't tied to any one country's currency.

And then there's the lesson of 2022. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Western countries froze around 300 billion dollars of Russia's central bank reserves. Money held in foreign banks can be frozen with a signature. Gold in your own vault is much harder to touch.

Central banks say this openly. In World Gold Council surveys, most of them say they hold gold because of how it performs in a crisis, and a growing share plan to buy more.

And where is all this gold kept?

Much of it sits in just a few places. The New York Fed. The Bank of England, with around 400,000 bars. And Fort Knox, which holds only American gold and allows no visitors. But trust has limits. Between 2013 and 2017, Germany moved 674 tons of its gold home to Frankfurt, from Paris and New York. And Venezuela has spent years trying to get its gold back from the Bank of England.

And they're buying. For about a decade, central banks bought around 400 to 500 tons a year. Then, from 2022 to 2024, more than 1,000 tons a year, three years in a row. The most on record. In early 2026, the gold price hit a record above 5,500 dollars an ounce.

But gold has a catch.

Gold pays no interest. It costs money to store and guard, and its price can swing wildly. Soon after that record, it fell sharply within days. Back in 1923, the economist John Maynard Keynes called the gold standard a barbarous relic.

And here's something to picture. All the gold ever mined, in all of human history, is about 220,000 tons. Melt it together, and it would fit in a cube about 22 meters on each side.

In short: Gold isn't really about gold. It's about trust. It's the money countries keep for the day they stop trusting everyone else's. And judging by the last few years, a lot of them are preparing for that day.