Do central banks really have more gold than US Treasury bonds?

Some people have been getting excited about a chart purporting to show central banks owning more gold than US Treasuries. Even FT contributing editor Mohamed El-Erian recirculated it on LinkedIn.

Could this signal an inflection point for the post-Bretton Woods world?

The chart © @TaviCosta

We were initially sceptical about the veracity of the data. And when Satori Insight’s clever clogs Matt King couldn’t reproduce it our scepticism was turbocharged. So we thought we’d take a closer look.

The IMF surveys central banks quarterly to produce their widely cited Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves report. And we can see from the latest release of this report that of $11.6tn global allocated FX reserves, king dollar constituted $6.7tn — 58 per cent of the total. Case closed? No.

Do central banks really have more gold than US Treasury bonds?

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