The Dutch central bank has spent the past six months quietly moving a large share of its gold out of North America and into London — and on September 2, it said so out loud. De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) confirmed it relocated 86 tonnes of gold, worth roughly $12 billion, from vaults in New York and Ottawa between March and August, citing what it called "increasing geopolitical unrest."
The mechanics matter here: this wasn't done by loading pallets onto a plane. More than 27 tonnes moved physically from the U.S. and Canada to the bank's own vault in Zeist, in the Netherlands, and a matching 27 tonnes moved physically from Zeist onward to London — a deliberate choice, the bank said, to avoid melting down and recasting bars along the way. The rest of the 86 tonnes was handled on paper: DNB sold gold held in North America and bought an equivalent amount already sitting in London.
DNB president Olaf Sleijpen framed the move as insurance, not alarm: "With this step, we have improved the deployability of the gold reserves. We assume that we will never need to deploy the gold, but it is nevertheless necessary to strengthen our resilience and preparedness." The bank's stated logic for choosing London specifically is liquidity: gold held at the Bank of England is, in DNB's words, considered the most easily tradable in the world, and the fastest to convert to cash in an actual crisis.
The Netherlands holds 612.4 tonnes of gold in total, valued at about €72.2 billion ($83.8 billion) at the end of 2025. Before the move, roughly half of that sat in North America — about 31% in New York, another 20% in Ottawa — with the rest split between London and the bank's own vault at home. After the transfer, London holds the single largest share of Dutch gold at just over 32%, up from about 18%, while the combined North American share has fallen to under 19%. The domestic holding in Zeist is essentially unchanged at just under 31%.
DNB isn't the first to make this kind of move, and the comparison is instructive because the stated reasons differ. Between July 2025 and January 2026, France's central bank, the Banque de France, sold off 129 tonnes — about 5% of its total holdings — that had been sitting at the New York Fed, replacing it with gold bought in Europe. France framed that switch around gold purity and quality standards, not geopolitics. The Dutch transfer is the first of the two to explicitly name geopolitical risk as the reason.
The backdrop makes the timing hard to ignore. The transfer was disclosed as U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was intervening in the yen market and announcing Treasury bond buybacks to bring down elevated yields, and as U.S. national debt crossed $40 trillion. Paul Donovan, an economist at UBS, called the pattern of central banks moving their safest, most conservative asset out of the country "not normal behavior," adding: "The signals around trust and the international reputation of the United States are quite dramatic." His point isn't that the dollar is collapsing — it's that when the world's most risk-averse institutions start relocating gold instead of leaving it where it's always been, that itself is information, regardless of what any one bank says its reason is.
DNB has been careful to frame this as routine risk management, not a statement about the United States, and 18-19% of its gold remaining in New York and Ottawa is still a meaningful vote of continued trust, not a full exit. But paired with France's own move out of the New York Fed the year before, and against a rising U.S. debt load drawing more attention from bond markets, it's part of a pattern worth watching rather than a single bank's isolated decision.
This piece is separate from Profoundd's earlier coverage of Fort Knox gold claims tied to the Epstein document archive — that piece addressed a specific, sourced fabrication about missing Fort Knox gold. This is current, on-the-record reporting from Bloomberg, Euronews, Fortune, and other outlets about an actual central-bank transfer, unrelated to that story or to Epstein in any way.