Foreign official investors held about $3.6 trillion of US Treasury securities in June 2026 after removing the institutions tied to the five largest legacy gold hoards. Reported gold outside the same group was worth roughly $2.5 trillion. The Treasury lead was about $1 trillion, according to a Federal Reserve staff reconstruction.
An allowance for official gold buying missing from IMF statistics narrows that lead to about $600 billion. It does not erase it. The popular claim that gold overtook Treasuries as the leading reserve asset therefore depends less on recent reserve-manager choices than on two measurement decisions: valuing gold at a rising market price and retaining metal accumulated by a concentrated set of old holders.
This is a reserve-accounting result, not a verdict on either asset. The stock data cannot reveal a central bank’s liquidity preference, sanctions concerns or expected returns.
The headline compares mismatched holders
At the end of 2025, world official gold was worth $5.1 trillion at market prices. Excluding the United States reduced it to $4.0 trillion. Foreign official Treasury holdings stood at $3.9 trillion, the Fed note reports.
The full comparison produced a $1.2 trillion gold lead. The closer comparison, which removes US gold, produced a lead of only about $100 billion.
That adjustment matters because the gold series includes US government holdings while the Treasury series, by definition, excludes the Federal Reserve. The United States cannot hold its own debt as a foreign reserve asset. The Fed analysis also values US gold at market prices rather than the statutory $42.22 per troy ounce used in some official accounts.
Gold’s quantity and its dollar value then moved in opposite analytical directions. Reported official holdings measured in fine troy ounces continued to rise through June 2026, yet Treasuries again exceeded gold after US holdings were removed. The reversal therefore came from valuation and Treasury flows, not official gold liquidation.
The World Gold Council’s second-quarter data make the valuation channel visible. The quarterly average gold price fell 8% from its first-quarter record to $4,506.29 an ounce, even as central banks bought an estimated 289 tonnes in the quarter. First-half net buying reached 345 tonnes. Gold’s market value could fall while its official owners added metal.
Foreign official investors were not abandoning Treasuries either. The Fed estimates net purchases of nearly $200 billion from the start of 2022 through April 2026. That total survived a period in which Japan, Switzerland, India and Korea sold more than $600 billion of foreign-exchange reserves through disclosed currency intervention.
A higher market value does not identify a reserve manager’s most recent choice.
Five holders account for half the gold
The concentration test changes the result more decisively. The United States holds about 22% of world official gold. Add Germany, Italy, France and the IMF, and the five account for about 52%, according to the Fed reconstruction. They have not accumulated gold in meaningful amounts since the 1970s. Most global official gold was acquired before the Bretton Woods system ended in 1971, while most foreign official Treasury holdings accumulated after 2000.
Removing those holders leaves a comparison closer to the countries now making active allocation decisions. The Fed estimates June holdings at about $3.6 trillion for Treasuries and $2.5 trillion for reported gold. Adding the World Gold Council’s estimate of purchases not captured in IMF data lifts the gold measure to roughly $3.0 trillion.
Neither bar is exact. The modified Treasury series in the Fed appendix subtracts all securities reserves of France, Germany and Italy because country-level Treasury positions are confidential. It also removes all Treasury holdings of international and regional organisations as a proxy for the IMF. The Fed calls the result a lower bound. Treasury’s TIC methodology adds another limitation: custodial data can assign securities to the country where they are held rather than the owner’s country.
The gold adjustment runs the other way. Some sovereign wealth funds and official institutions do not report their metal as national reserves to the IMF. The World Gold Council estimates this unreported activity from market supply and demand. That method catches hidden purchases but cannot identify every buyer. A $600 billion residual gap is meaningful, but not laboratory precision.
Reserve shares do not measure the same thing
The dollar’s share of disclosed foreign-exchange reserves rose to 57.13% in the first quarter of 2026 from 56.42% in the previous quarter, while total reserves slipped to $13.10 trillion from $13.15 trillion, according to IMF COFER data. Roughly half the dollar-share increase came from exchange-rate valuation effects. COFER excludes gold, so its dollar share neither confirms nor refutes a gold-versus-Treasury crossover.
Gold accumulation remains real. The World Gold Council’s 2026 survey says central banks added about 1,000 tonnes a year on average over the preceding four years, twice the prior decade’s average. Among 76 respondents, 89% expected global official gold holdings to rise over the next year and 45% expected their own holdings to increase.
Those flows support a diversification story. They do not prove that gold has displaced the dollar’s core reserve functions. Gold is a non-currency asset valued continuously in dollars. Treasuries are one part of dollar reserves, alongside deposits and other securities. A price-driven stock comparison mixes allocation, market performance and inherited history into one number.
The Fed note has its own institutional vantage point and expressly represents its author’s views, not the Board’s. Its strongest contribution is narrower than its title: after matching holders and allowing for opaque purchases, the June data still show a Treasury lead. The celebrated crossover survives only as a headline balance-sheet valuation, not as a clean measure of what reserve managers chose.
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