Gold Gone AWOL? The Curious Case of Foreign Central Banks’ Gold Stored in Canada

With the price of gold rocketing and with gold re-establishing itself as the leading monetary reserve asset for central banks worldwide, the quantities of physical gold held by each central bank and the locations of those reserves are becoming increasingly critical questions.

While most have heard of the Bank of England’s fabled gold vault in London and the New York Fed’s deep underground gold vault in Manhattan — both preferred storage facilities for central banks — did you know that four central banks from Europe claim to store a substantial amount of gold with the Bank of Canada in Ottawa?

These are the central banks of the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden and Belgium, known respectively as De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), the Swiss National Bank (SNB), the Swedish Riksbank, and the National Bank of Belgium (NBB). And the amount of gold that these four central banks claim to hold in Ottawa is not insubstantial, totaling approximately 270 tonnes.

Like nearly everything in the opaque and secretive world of central bank gold, these four central banks had been, for many years, quietly keeping their heads down, never revealing that portions of their national monetary gold holdings were supposedly being stored in Ottawa.

But then a perfect storm of factors aligned that forced them to break the secrecy, factors which interplayed and triggered increased expectations for gold holdings transparency — the Great…