Gold Just Overtook US Treasuries.

At the end of 2025 gold passed 27 percent of the world’s official reserves, ahead of US Treasuries at 22 percent and the euro at 15. That is not a gold dealer’s estimate. It is the European Central Bank’s own count, published in its June 2026 report on the international role of the euro. A Federal Reserve economist has since published a note disputing the framing, and his own numbers are worth reading too, because even his rebuttal concedes the direction. This is the written version of the video, and every figure below is checked against the release it came from.

What the ECB’s own count shows

The European Central Bank tracks the composition of global official reserves every year. Its June 2026 report puts gold at 27 percent of them at the end of 2025, US Treasuries at 22 percent, and the euro at 15 percent. The same report adds a caveat in the same paragraph: most of the move, it says, is a valuation effect, because the gold price rose about 30 percent in 2024 and about 60 percent in 2025. That caveat is true and worth sitting with. But a valuation effect only happens to an asset you already own. Central banks were holding gold in size before it ran 60 percent, and they kept buying on the way up. That is a position, not an accident.

The objection, and what it concedes

On September 3, 2026, Federal Reserve economist Colin Weiss published a FEDS Note titled “Why gold didn’t actually overtake Treasury securities as the world’s favorite reserve asset.” His own numbers: at the end of 2025, gold held outside the United States was worth $4 trillion. Foreign governments’ Treasury holdings were $3.9 trillion. His argument is that Treasuries retook the lead by June 2026, by roughly $1 trillion, and that most of the world’s gold was acquired before 1971, while most foreign Treasury holdings were accumulated after 2000. Both points are true, and foreign official investors kept buying Treasuries too, nearly $200 billion net from 2022 through April 2026. Read how Weiss states the June reversal, though. Treasuries retook the lead, in his words, “despite further increases in gold reserves.” The rebuttal concedes the direction even while it disputes the finish line.

Chart two, the buying that got it there

The reserve share did not move on its own. From 2010 through 2021, central banks bought gold at an average pace of about 473 tonnes a year, according to the World Gold Council’s Gold Demand Trends series. In 2022 they bought 1,081.9 tonnes on the Council’s latest revision. In 2023, 1,037.4 tonnes. In 2024, 1,092.4 tonnes. Three straight years at more than double the old pace. Buying slowed in 2025 to 863.3 tonnes, which the Council called the upper end of what it expected. Poland alone took 102 tonnes that year, more than any other country. The Council’s own 2026 survey of reserve managers found 84 percent expect gold’s share of world reserves to be higher in five years, and a record 45 percent plan to add to their own holdings. These are not traders chasing a chart. They are the most conservative institutions on earth, and they told the Council what they intend to do next.

Chart three, what the safe asset cost a saver

Here is what that shift meant for someone doing the ordinary, cautious thing. A 10-year Treasury bought at the end of 2020 paid 0.93 percent a year, per the Treasury’s own par yield curve. Collect every coupon and reinvest it at that same rate for five years and the position grows to an index value of 104.7, if 100 is what you started with. Consumer prices, measured by the CPI-U over the same five years, rose to an index value of 124.4. Divide one by the other and the saver ended up with about 16 percent less buying power than the day they lent the money, even though the bond never missed a payment. That was never the risk with a Treasury. Gold over the same five years went from $1,887.60 an ounce to $4,367.80, an index value of 231.4 on the same scale, per the LBMA’s year-end price fix. The asset the textbooks call unproductive more than doubled. The asset they call risk-free lost ground in every one of those five years.

Your account never had that meeting

The people whose job is to protect a nation’s savings looked at the safest asset in the world, decided it was not safe enough on its own, and changed the mix. A standard 60/40 account is stocks and Treasuries, run by a target-date fund that will not be reading the ECB’s report. The move central banks made is available to any American saver too, and has been for almost 30 years. Congress opened the door in 1997 through the Taxpayer Relief Act, Public Law 105-34, Section 304, which amended the tax code at 26 U.S. Code 408(m)(3) to let an IRA hold bullion of the fineness a futures contract market requires, so long as a trustee holds it in physical possession rather than the account owner. The provision applies to taxable years beginning after December 31, 1997. An American has been able to hold physical gold inside an IRA ever since, through a custodian, in an insured depository, with the same tax treatment as the rest of a retirement account. It is the same decision the most careful buyers on earth made, sized for what fits your own account.

Chapters

1. 00:00 The story everyone is telling
2. 00:28 The bridge and the question
3. 01:10 Chart one, the crossover
4. 02:04 The objection
5. 02:55 Chart two, the buying
6. 04:05 Chart three, what the safe asset did to a saver
7. 04:59 Your account is the reserve that never moved
8. 05:52 Close

Where every number came from

Listed in the order the claims appear in the video. Every link goes to the document the figure was read from rather than to coverage of it.

1. Gold, US Treasuries and the euro as shares of global official reserves, end-2025. ECB, “The international role of the euro,” June 2026 edition, Chart 7 panel a, including the report’s own valuation-effect caveat.
2. The Fed’s rebuttal, its own figures, and the verbatim quote. Federal Reserve, FEDS Notes, “Why gold didn’t actually overtake Treasury securities as the world’s favorite reserve asset,” Colin Weiss, September 3, 2026. Views expressed in the note are the author’s own.
3. Central bank gold purchases, 2022 to 2025, and the 2026 reserve manager survey. World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends, Full Year 2025, Central Banks and Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey 2026, both industry-funded.
4. Central bank gold purchases, 2010 to 2014. World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends, Full Year 2015, SEC-filed copy.
5. Gold prices. LBMA PM price, daily series, year-end fix.
6. 10-year Treasury yield, year-end 2020. US Treasury, Daily Treasury Par Yield Curve Rates.
7. Consumer prices, CPI-U, 2020 to 2025. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Consumer Price Index, since 1913, a BLS-CPI-U-sourced series.
8. The 1997 law. Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, Public Law 105-34, Section 304.
9. IRA metals rules as codified today. 26 U.S. Code 408(m).

The five-year real-loss figure on the Treasury position holds coupons at the year-end 2020 par yield, reinvested through year-end 2025, then measures that against the CPI-U’s index move over the same five years. All three chart-three series are indexed to 100 at year-end 2020 so a 0.93 percent yield, a CPI index and a dollar gold price can share one scale.

Gold IRA Digest does not sell gold. We read the rules and the record, and we publish what they say.

This is general information about how gold IRAs work and what the public record shows. It is not investment, tax or legal advice and it does not know your situation. Talk to a licensed adviser before moving retirement money.