alt Hacker NewsGold overtakes U.S. Treasuries as the largest foreign reserve asset
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Dated Jan 9. When the headlines is in present tense, it is kinda misleading to post as-is at a later time.
The events of the last year certainly have a role to play, but the overall effect is just the result of trendlines that have been in play for quite a while.
Here's a world gold council (i know...) review/survey of central banks gold holdings from mid 2025 (https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/central-bank-gold-rese...). It notes that gold purchases (by mass) have been elevated going back to ~2023.
Gold prices have also been on an upward trajectory ever since 2023 (https://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html)
Whatever is happening now is bigger than actions over the last year.
The fact that this all happened by choice is really something.
It's like witnessing a self-decapitation.
For the first time in history we are seeing multiple signals of USD losing its #1 position to EUR, all within the last year :
1. Euro-denominated interest rate derivatives (IRD) overtook US dollar-denominated contracts in the over-the-counter (OTC) market for the first time in history and the scale of the crossover is staggering.
2. EUR Real Effective Exchange Rate (REER) which measures actual purchasing power (not nominal price) is going in the opposite direction of USD real purchasing power (RTWEXBGS). 2025/2026 is the largest divergence in history: 10 percentage points in a year.
3. US treasuries is no longer a number 1 foreign reserve asset. EUR reserves grew 2.5x faster than USD reserves when measured in its own absolute terms.
Unlike the Eurozone which maintains a fiscally responsible budget with reasonable debt and a trade surplus, there is simply no foreseeable fix to the problem of ballooning US debt and trade deficits. Nothing can fix the US budget mess.
Anyone who is paying attention to the numbers would certainly have more confidence in EUR over USD.
Silver has gone up more by percentage since 47, as a side note
Is there a place where we can find the complete USA investment portfolio?
I am actually convinced that the last year started the descent of the U.S. as the world’s super power. No wonder U.S. treasuries lost trust. It’s only going to get worse. It doesn’t matter what some billionaires do/get from their ability to manipulate some powers be. The rest of the investment community understands that free markets are strengthened by rule of law and adherence to the law and deploying a self styled socialistic distribution of economic capital is not signaling strength but weakness to the world.
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If the value of gold goes up, doesn't this essentially help the US anyway? I believe our gold reservers are twice that of the closest country?
Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/gold-reserves
Wow. This reflects the price of gold going up. A lot.
America was in practice running an empire that collected tribute from the rest of planet earth in exchange for entries in a database denominated in a currency they controlled and that was accepted everywhere. Really the only way it could go wrong is putting it under the control of someone who doesn't understand the kayfabe...