Central Banks Just Spent a Record $37 Billion on This Asset

When it comes to buying gold, who are you gonna trust—Hank or the Banks?

We Americans go absolutely street-rat feral when friends and neighbors tell us they’re buying Beanie Babies and Cabbage Patch Kids, and claim they’re pocketing a fortune on the “investment.”

But when the people who print money for a living start telling us what they’re doing… nothing. No FOMO. No frenzy. Basically, crickets.

What I am on about today, of course, is gold.

Gold, I’m sure you’re aware, has pulled back fairly sharply because of the war against Iran. The selloff stems from street-rat feral investors who lost their nerve, maybe because friends and neighbors and probably some influencer on Twitter/X told them the craze was over.

“Get out while you can before gold goes below zero.”

Here’s what the friends and neighbors and Johnny-come-lately influencers aren’t sharing (because they don’t know): Central banks—the institutions that literally manufacture the money in your wallet—in the first quarter of 2026 spent $37 billion buying gold. That set a record for the highest spend in a single quarter… ever.

Hank the neighbor is selling gold because his barber’s cat’s veterinarian told him the jig was up…

But central bankers are buying.

Who are you going to listen to?

Central bankers are not investors chasing momentum. These are the finance ministries and reserve managers of sovereign nations—the most cautious, most deliberate, most boring buyers on the planet. They order sparkling water at an open bar and consider it a party like it’s 1999.

And here they are piling into gold at a historic pace.

More importantly, to buy all that gold… they’re selling a whole lot of dollars.

Think about what that tells us.

The people who understand money at the most fundamental level—who study reserve dynamics, who model currency risk, who war-game financial crises for a living—are converting US dollars into gold as fast as they reasonably can.

The people who have demonstrated, repeatedly and without apology, that they will spend whatever they must regardless of the consequences, are selling the money America prints to buy an asset that even central bankers cannot control. 

I mean, that makes me laugh. Like, I actually snickered out loud as I just wrote that last paragraph, and the girl running the coffee shop I’m sitting in here in Preveza, Greece looked up at me like I might be having an episode. Here’s a pic of my office today:

So what do we have?

On one side of the ledger, we have Hank and his buddies selling gold to reclaim dollars.

On the other side, we have the people who print money selling dollars to turn them into gold.

Hmmm.

What to do?

Decisions, decisions.

Let’s toss in some more facts to help us with this oh so challenging conundrum…
Central banks have now been net buyers of gold for 17 consecutive months.
The World Gold Council’s annual survey found that 68% of central banks plan to increase their gold holdings over the next twelve months—and that survey was taken when gold was already near record highs.
These institutions are not buying because they missed the rally and are chasing. They are buying because they believe the reasons to own gold are structural and durable, not cyclical and temporary.
What are those reasons?

Ones they will not say publicly—out of fear of reprisal—but are obvious from their actions:
Uncle Sam is carrying more than $39 trillion in national debt, adding roughly $2 trillion to that figure annually. There is no plausible scenario in which that debt is repaid in real terms, or even paid down significantly.
A realization that the only realistic options to manage American debt are driving higher inflation rates—that destroys the purchasing power of dollar-denominated assets—or some form of fiscal/monetary restructuring, which would be unprecedented for the world’s reserve currency but is no longer unthinkable.
The sanctions worry. When the West froze roughly $300 billion in Russian foreign reserves after the invasion of Ukraine, every finance ministry on earth updated its threat model, realizing that the country that controls the world’s reserve currency could easily turn its ire on them and shut down access to dollars and their financial accounts around the world.
Add up the numbers, carry the remainder, divide by pi… and what central bankers are left with is a dark but honest assessment that holding dollars represents a huge risk.

Gold carries no risk beyond market risk.

No government, no central banker, can print more gold. Gold is no one’s liability and it cannot be inflated away by fiscal policies designed to save the government by screwing Hank and his neighbors.

Probably more relevant is that the US government can’t reach into your domestic gold vaults with sanctions that destroy your country’s ability to spend money on the global stage.

So, countries are gobbling up gold at a historically fast pace.

Many are repatriating gold out of the US, the UK, and elsewhere so that their gold is held at home, in their vaults, that the US can’t reach.

Which brings me back ‘round to the question: Who are you gonna take investment advice from—Hank or the banks?

You know my answer.