The central bank of the Netherlands has transferred a large part of its gold reserves out of the United States since March, citing “increasing geopolitical unrest” and the need to be prepared for crisis.
The bank, De Nederlandsche Bank, said in a statement on Wednesday that it had moved more than a quarter of the 345 U.S. tons of gold it had been holding in North America to London between March and August, and deposited it at the Bank of England, whose bullion holdings are “regarded as the world’s most tradable gold and will therefore be the most readily available” should a crisis arise.
“With this relocation, we have improved the tradeability of our gold reserves,” said Olaf Sleijpen, the bank’s president. “We expect that we will never need to use them, but we do need to strengthen our resilience and preparedness.”
The Dutch move may reflect increasingly strained relations between the Trump administration and Europe, where some economists and lawmakers in Germany and Italy have called for the repatriation of gold reserves from the United States. Trans-Atlantic ties have frayed since President Trump returned to the White House last year and launched rhetorical and tariff wars with longstanding allies, as well as a shooting war in the Middle East that European officials say has hurt their economies.
“Clearly the climate of the cooling of relations across the Atlantic must have played a role,” said Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, an economist and senior fellow in the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Washington policy think tank, the Brookings Institution. It matters little where the gold is stored as long as it is secure and readily traded, but Mr. Milesi-Ferretti said “domestic considerations about the perception of holding assets” in the United States may be a factor in European thinking.
The Dutch bank said it had moved about 95 tons of gold in total, the great majority of it from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and a much smaller portion from the Bank of Canada in Ottawa. The New York Fed’s vault in Lower Manhattan holds the world’s largest store of gold owned by national governments — almost 7,000 tons, as of 2024.
The Netherlands is the second European nation this year to announce the transfer of reserves out of the United States. France’s central bank earlier this year said that, through a series of more than two dozen transactions between July 2025 and January 2026, it had sold more than 140 tons of gold reserves held in the United States, yielding about $15 billion in profit amid surging gold prices at the time.
The move, which left no French central bank gold reserve holdings in New York, was not political, France’s central bank said.
Germany repatriated some of its gold about a decade ago and now keeps about half at home, a third in New York and the rest in London. More than 40 percent of Italy’s gold is stored domestically, about the same amount is stored in New York and the rest is kept in Britain and Switzerland. The Italian and German central banks have said they have no plans to bring their gold home.
Countries have long stored gold holdings at the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, which have strong security, with no theft of gold ever reported from either’s vaults. Because many countries rely on the same bank, they can trade gold among themselves without having to move it in and out of any buildings — it just moves to a different part of the vault.
The Netherlands had previously held more than 31 percent of its gold in New York and more than 19 percent in Ottawa.
“The geographical spread of the Dutch gold reserves is now more balanced, with both the United States and Canada each holding 18.5 percent,” the Dutch central bank said.
It did not specify the tonnage moved from each country, but the percentages indicate that about 90 tons came from the United States.
The bank said the relocation had been “largely effected” by first selling about 65 tons of gold in New York and then buying gold in London, and physically transferring nearly 30 tons from the United States and Canada to Zeist in the Netherlands. Gold was then transferred from Zeist to London.
Nearly a third of Dutch gold reserves, about 32 percent, are now being held in London — up from about 18 percent — while holdings in Zeist remain at about 30 percent, as before, the Dutch central bank said.
The timing of the Dutch transfers, which began in the month after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, and the bank’s stated concern about geopolitical unrest, may suggest that the ongoing war bolstered the decision to move some of the bank’s gold holdings.
But central banks tend not to act quickly, which means it is unlikely that the decision to move gold reserves was prompted solely by the conflict, if at all, said Mr. Milesi-Ferretti, of Brookings.
Eshe Nelson contributed reporting.
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