According to analysts quoted by the Japanese business daily Nikkei Asia, central banks throughout the globe have increased their gold purchases after the freezing of Russia’s abroad assets as a result of sanctions this year.
According to reports, the United States and its allies have frozen over $300 billion worth of Russian foreign reserves, in addition to billions more in assets belonging to people and enterprises. The Kremlin has been quite vocal about their disapproval of the seizures, calling them “stealing.”
According to data that was disclosed in the Nov report released by the World Gold Council, gold purchases from regulators over the period of July to September reached 399.3 tons, which is a more than quadruple increase from the previous period.
The statistic represents a significant increase when compared to the previous quarter’s recording of 186 tons and to the first quarter of this year’s recording of 87.7 tons. Meanwhile, the sum for the first eleven months of the year has already surpassed any entire year since 1967.
After seeing how Russia’s overseas securities were frozen as part of sanctions, Emin Yurumazu, a Turkish economist based in Japan, told the media that “anti-Western countries seem to be eager to accrue gold holdings on hand.” He made this statement after countries saw how Russia’s assets were frozen overseas.
Previous reports indicated that the central banks of Turkey, Uzbekistan, and India had acquired a total of 31.2 tons, 26.1 tons, and 17.5 tons of gold, respectively. At this time, it is unknown which countries acquired the remaining 300 tons of the total amount estimated in the report compiled by the industry association.
According to the agency, a financial & precious-metals expert named Koichiro Kamei was quoted as stating that an unnamed slice of “this scale is unheard of.” Some unexplained purchases are to be anticipated, but an undetermined slice of “this volume is unheard of.”
Itsuo Toshima, a market analyst and the former Japanese chairman of the World Gold Commission, said that it is quite probable that China purchased a significant quantity of gold from Russia. He indicated that the gold reserves held by the Central Bank of Russia totaling over 2,000 tons were probably bought by the People’s Bank of China at some point.
The analyst remarked that this is usual conduct from the Chinese financial regulator, which did not reveal any gold acquisitions from 2009 to 2015, and then stated that it had boosted the reserves by 600 tons. The expert highlighted that this is typical behavior from Chinese monetary regulators. Since 2019, the People’s Bank of China has not made any fresh reports public about the country’s gold purchases.
The recent craze for purchasing gold is one of the central banks’ most recent efforts to safeguard their holdings by lowering their reliance on the U.S. currency. China has been a significant driving factor behind the recent shift away from dollarization. The United States Treasury Department reports that between March and November of this year, the government sold a total of $121.2 billion worth of US bonds.