(Gainesville Coins via Zero Hedge)—My estimation of global official gold reserves hit 38,764 tonnes in Q2 2023, breaking its previous record from 1965. The new high confirms the world has entered a new era of gold. Central banks will continue to accumulate gold and the metal’s role in the international monetary system will increase to the detriment of the US dollar.
Analysts widely use the International Monetary Fund (IMF) calculation for total official gold holdings, though what is usually overlooked is that this number is an estimate by the Fund. As mentioned in my previous article on the official gold reserves of China, not every central bank is transparent about its gold holdings. The Chinese central bank (PBoC) reports to have 2,113 tonnes, while it’s an open secret in the gold industry the PBoC owns much more than that—about 5,000 tonnes, according to my analysis. Another example, the central bank of Syria stopped reporting its gold holdings in 2011. For its computation of world holdings, the IMF carries forward the last known data point, assuming Syria still holds 26 tonnes.
My personal evaluation of global official gold reserves is largely based on how the IMF compiles its world series, the main difference being “unreported purchases” traced by industry insiders that I include in my data. My approach:
- The base consists of the the last registered volumes from all central banks and monetary authorities, also of the ones that stopped reporting years ago.
- For China I use my own numbers going back to 1995.
- Unreported purchases by central banks other than the PBoC are added, measured by the difference between the World Gold Council’s estimated total purchases based on field research and reported changes by all central banks combined.
- Known reserves by sovereign wealth funds are included*.
- Gold owned by international financial intuitions such as the European Central Bank and West African Economic and Monetary Union is also added.
- Swaps on the balance sheets of the Turkish central bank and Bank for International Settlements (BIS) are subtracted.
Based on my methodology, world official gold holdings reached 38,764 tonnes in June 2023, which is approximately 400 tonnes more than the prior high set in 1965 at 38,347 tonnes.
The new record reflects a desire by central banks the world over to diversify away from the US dollar with its ever more evident counterparty risks. Central banks’ turning point in gold holdings came just after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, since when they have bought more than 7,000 tonnes.
The value of global gold reserves grew by 66% from that moment, while foreign exchange reserves have swelled by 30%. As a result, gold’s share of global international reserves (gold and foreign exchange) is rising from an all-time low in 2015.
There is plenty of upside for the gold price if gold’s share of total reserves (currently 17%) should ever come close to its long-term average (58%). In a previous article I speculated gold could reach $8,000 in the next ten years.
In context of increasing geopolitical tensions, a weaponized dollar, and sky-high debt levels across the globe (historically alleviated through inflation), central banks will continue to buy gold in the foreseeable future.
The new record in gold reserves is mostly a symbolic milestone. Any trends I describe haven’t been altered but reconfirmed by the new high.
Foreign central banks mostly own US government bonds (Treasuries) as dollar assets. As their gold reserves are rising, their nominal holdings of Treasuries have been roughly flat in the past decade. So, against massive increases in US public debt every year, the share of foreign central banks owning that debt is steadily decreasing. This dynamic could lead to a funding crisis in the US, further eroding the dollar’s appeal as a reserve currency.
*It’s unknown how the IMF exactly calculates its world series, but I suspect they don’t include gold owned by sovereign wealth funds. My figures include about 100 tonnes for such funds.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.