Who's Buying the Gold Nobody Can Trace?

On October 7, China's central bank published one of the dullest documents in finance: its monthly reserve statement.

Buried in the table was a single line. Gold holdings: 77.47 million ounces. Up 740,000 ounces in a month.

That made it 23 months in a row that the People's Bank of China had added gold to its reserves.

A country's reserves are its national savings account, the money its central bank keeps on hand to defend the currency and pay the bills abroad. For most countries, that account is held mainly in US dollars and US government bonds.

China's September purchase was its largest in three years. It cost about $3 billion.

It also came in a terrible month for gold. The price fell more than 6% in September, and by month's end the gold China already owned was worth $26.6 billion less than it had been in August.

So China watched its gold lose $26 billion in value. Then it placed its biggest order since 2023.

And that's just the buying we can see. Most of the gold central banks bought last year, nobody can see at all.

By the end of this Benchmark, you'll understand why the most important buyer in the gold market prefers not to be seen.

535 tonnes of nobody’s gold

Central banks report their gold holdings to the International Monetary Fund. The World Gold Council, the gold industry's research body, adds those reports up every month.

Then it does something more interesting. With a consultancy called Metals Focus, it follows where physical gold actually goes, using trade statistics and field research, and estimates how much central banks bought without telling anyone.

In 2025, central banks bought 863 tonnes of gold.

But only 328 tonnes of it showed up in official reports.

The other 535 tonnes, 62% of the total, were bought by buyers the data can't name. At today's price, that's more than $70 billion of gold with no owner on record.

Even the estimate is slippery. The Council first put central bank buying in the first quarter of 2026 at 244 tonnes. In July, it cut that to 57.

Who, then, is buying it?

Nobody can say for certain. But Goldman Sachs has a prime suspect.

Goldman's analysts track gold as it moves through London, the world's main trading hub, and into central bank vaults. Their model estimates China bought more than 48 tonnes in May. China reported 10.

In July, Goldman put China's buying at about 35 tonnes, against roughly 20 reported. In August, 25 tonnes against 20.

Goldman's working assumption is that China is buying at least twice what it tells the world.

It's a model, not a disclosure. But if it's right, the buyer we can see and the buyer we can't are largely the same one.

China tells the world it's buying gold. It just doesn't say how much.

So why stay quiet?

Gold is the one reserve asset no other government can freeze. Central banks learned that in February 2022, when the US and its allies froze roughly $300 billion of Russia's central bank reserves after the invasion of Ukraine.

If you're a central bank moving your savings out of dollars, announcing it pushes up the price of what you're buying. It also tells other governments exactly what you're doing.

So what we have is a run out of the dollar, of sorts. A slow one, conducted mostly in silence.

The US dollar seems not to have noticed yet. Last week, it hit a 17-month high against other major currencies.

Gold's bad autumn

A run normally pushes up the price of whatever people are running into.

For two years, that's what happened. Gold rose 64% in 2025, its best year since 1979. On January 29 this year, it touched $5,595 an ounce.

But then it turned.

As I wrote in Regime Change, inflation is back. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates in September for the first time in three years, and the 10-year US Treasury yield is above 5%.

Gold pays no interest. So when a safe government bond pays 5%, holding a bar of metal that pays nothing becomes less attractive.

Gold now trades around $4,160, about 26% below its January peak. On October 16, it finished its seventh straight week of losses, its longest losing streak since the summer of 1996.

(To be fair to gold, it's only down about 4% for the year. January was the top of a very steep climb.)

Which raises the question this whole quiet run depends on.

What happens to a run when the thing you're running into falls by a quarter?

A bank run in reverse

Some central banks bought more as the price fell.

In July, the governor of Poland's central bank, Adam Glapiński, told reporters: 'We've been consistently buying gold, taking advantage of the recent price drops.'

Poland bought 82 tonnes in the first half of the year, taking its holdings past 630 tonnes on the way to a 700-tonne target. Uzbekistan has bought close to 50 tonnes this year, and gold now makes up 90% of its reserves.

In the second quarter, while gold had its worst quarter since 2013, central banks bought 289 tonnes, a record for a second quarter. Preliminary figures for September show 63 tonnes of reported buying, the most in any month for two years.

This is a bank run in reverse. Normally, falling prices drive depositors out. Here, they're drawing buyers in.

But not everyone.

When war with Iran broke out in late February, oil spiked and Turkey's lira came under attack. Its central bank sold or swapped close to 60 tonnes of gold in two weeks to defend the currency. It's a net seller of 82 tonnes this year.

Russia, the country whose frozen reserves started much of this, has been selling too. Its central bank has been selling gold to help cover a budget deficit swollen by four years of war.

So the run has two kinds of depositor. Those who buy more as the price falls. And those who need the cash, and have to sell into falling prices.

History has examples of both.

Le gold, s'il vous plaît

On February 4, 1965, Charles de Gaulle used a press conference in Paris to call for the world to go back to settling its debts in gold.

After World War II, the world's currencies had been tied to the dollar, and the dollar was tied to gold at $35 an ounce. A foreign central bank could hand the US Treasury its dollars and ask for gold in return.

But America could print dollars. It couldn't print gold. De Gaulle's finance minister, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, had a name for the advantage this gave Washington: an 'exorbitant privilege'.

So France started cashing in its dollars. As the story goes, de Gaulle sent the French navy across the Atlantic to bring the gold home.

Just in April, they finished the job:

Nothing about the 1965 return was quiet. The noise was the point.

At the time, the US and seven European central banks were running the London Gold Pool, selling gold into the market to hold the price at $35. In June 1967, France announced it was pulling out.

The pool lasted nine more months. It collapsed in March 1968, and London's gold market shut for two weeks.

Three years later, Nixon closed the gold window for good.

The Chancellor who sold the bottom

Thirty-one years after de Gaulle, a central bank made the opposite bet with the same conviction.

On May 7, 1999, Britain's Treasury, under Chancellor Gordon Brown, announced it would sell about half the country's gold. Gold had spent nearly two decades falling. It looked like a relic.

Announcing a sale in advance is a gift to anyone hoping to buy cheaper. By July 20, gold had fallen to $252.80, a low traders still call Brown's Bottom.

Over 17 auctions, Britain sold about 395 tonnes at an average of roughly $275 an ounce. It raised about $3.5 billion.

In September 1999, European central banks signed the Washington Agreement, capping their own gold sales. Gold jumped from around $260 to around $330 in two weeks.

Britain's 395 tonnes would be worth about $53 billion today.

Brown's sale was patient, official and indifferent to price. That is how central banks are buying gold today.

Central banks can wait longer than almost anyone. They can also be wrong for longer.

The other lesson from 1999 is about noise. Brown told the market what he was going to do two months before his first auction, and the market moved first.

Today's biggest buyers seem to have learned it.

The next number to watch

Later this month, the World Gold Council will publish its estimate for the third quarter, the first full quarter of gold's slide. It will tell us how much central banks bought while the price was falling.

Around November 7, China will publish its October reserve statement. If gold holdings are up again, that will make 24 months in a row: two full years of buying, through a boom and now a bust.

De Gaulle wanted the whole world to watch France take its gold.

Today's buyers would rather nobody watched at all. And judging by the numbers, most of them are getting their wish.

This week's quote:

'In few words, mysteries are due to secrecy.'

— Francis Bacon

Invest in knowledge,

Thom

The Benchmark

Read more: What happens when you auction off the right to tax your people?

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