Fears that President Donald Trump could freeze foreign assets are driving billions in gold out of New York’s vaults, an economics journalist warned.
In a Thursday article for The Bulwark, economics editor and columnist Catherine Rampell described the gold retreat as a signal of how far U.S. relationships, in particular with its European allies, have deteriorated.
“In a frightening sign of just how much trust has been lost between the United States and its erstwhile allies, billions of dollars of gold reserves are being repatriated or otherwise moved out of Trump’s reach,” Rampell wrote.
The Dutch central bank announced on Wednesday that it had moved roughly $12 billion in gold, most of it held in New York, to vaults in London, Rampell noted. France’s central bank recently sold about $15 billion in bullion stored in New York and replaced it with bars kept in Paris. Germany and Italy, which are the second- and third-largest holders of gold reserves behind the U.S., have spent the past year weighing whether to bring theirs home too, Rampell added.
The concern is less that Trump would seize the gold than that he might freeze it, Rampell explained. Washington and its allies did the same with Russia’s reserves after the invasion of Ukraine, she pointed out.
A German member of the European Parliament, Markus Ferber, warned that the risk is impossible to dismiss, she noted.
“Trump is erratic, and one cannot rule out that someday he will come up with creative ideas how to treat foreign gold reserves,” Ferber said, per Rampell.
Rampell admitted the scale of the fear caught her off guard.
“It hadn’t really occurred to me that investors might be diversifying away from U.S. dollar-denominated assets because they also feared losing access to them,” she wrote.
The nervousness has built during a string of Trump moves, including his “Liberation Day” tariffs, his threats to annex Greenland, his push to take “golden share” stakes in private companies, and his stated wish to personally inspect Fort Knox, according to Rampell.
Because gold sits inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Trump’s campaign to control the Federal Reserve feeds fears that foreign reserves could be next, Rampell wrote. A representative of Germany’s Taxpayers Federation put it bluntly, she noted.
“It’s our money,” the representative said. “It should be brought back.”
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