The Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, has the world’s second largest stock of gold at 3,352 tonnes. One-third of it is stored at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for reasons dating back to the Cold War and the monetary system created in the wake of World War Two.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s confrontations with longstanding allies over trade and security, and his attacks on the Fed, have revived the issue in recent weeks and more mainstream voices have joined the debate.
“Trump wants to control the Fed, which would also mean controlling the German gold reserves in the U.S.” Michael Jaeger, the Taxpayers Federation’s vice-president, told Reuters. “It’s our money, it should be brought back.”
“Trump is erratic and one cannot rule out that someday he will come up with creative ideas how to treat foreign gold reserves,“ he told Reuters. “The Bundesbank’s policy for gold reserves has to reflect the new geopolitical realities.”
The Bundesbank said the New York Fed remained “an important storage location” for its gold.
The German Finance Ministry referred Reuters queries on the matter to the central bank, while stressing the Bundesbank’s independence.
The European Central Bank last week stressed its trust in the Fed as a reliable partner. But Trump’s frequent criticism of Fed chair Jerome Powell, whose term ends in a year, has fuelled some concerns about the Fed’s future independence and its long-standing commitments to its partners.
“When I started asking about the gold, I was dismissed as a conspiracy theorist,“ he said. “Today, after Trump, my concerns are shared widely.”
A key advantage of storing some of it in New York during the Cold War was to keep it at a safe distance from Russia in case of an invasion.
With the Soviet Union long gone, the Bundesbank brought back 300 tonnes of gold from New York between 2014 and 2017, saying it wanted to “build confidence at home”.
For Ferber, this underscored the need for greater diversification across several, and potentially new, locations. Today, Germany’s gold reserves are held at the Bundesbank headquarters in Frankfurt, in New York, and at the Bank of England in London.
Fritz Guentzler, a spokesperson for the Christian Democrats in the German parliament, said he had no reason to mistrust the Fed but the Bundesbank should continue “regularly inspecting the stocks” of gold.
The Bundesbank said it ran regular sample tests and had inspected 13% of stock in New York over the years.
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