The issue of Germany's gold reserves has returned to the forefront of discussion following renewed talk about repatriating 1,200-1,300 tons stored at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — about a third of Berlin's total reserve of 3,352 tons, the second-largest official stock in the world. These assets have historically been distributed between New York, London, and Paris as a security measure since the Cold War, before Germany recovered 674 tons from 2013 to 2017 to ensure that more than half of its gold remains on its soil.
Today, the possibility of Donald Trump returning to the White House has prompted prominent politicians to warn against using gold as a leverage tool in any transatlantic disputes. What was a marginal discussion has become a daily media topic, under the title: Does Berlin remain 'subservient' in the Manhattan vault?
The Bundesbank insists on its confidence in the Federal Reserve and reminds that diversifying storage locations facilitates access to dollar markets during crises. But merely raising the idea of 'ally unreliability' poisons the foundation of the trust-based system: if major euro economies doubt, what prevents others from reassessing their relationships with the dollar?
The potential impact exceeds gold. Any mass wave of reserve withdrawals could lead to a structural shift in demand for U.S. Treasury instruments and accelerate the path of 'multipolar financing' already led by Beijing and Moscow through the yuan and gold. Here, 'Bitcoin' stands out as an unseizable reserve option; a borderless asset without banking oversight, surviving political extortion, even if it remains highly volatile and regulatory trapped in some jurisdictions.
If the contagion of doubt spreads to the rest of Washington's allies, not to mention its adversaries, we could witness a dual-track race: a physical repatriation of gold from New York and a selective reliance on digital gold that is difficult to freeze. At that point, the dominance of the dollar would not just be threatened; the definition of 'sovereign reserve' itself would be tested for the first time since 1944.
If countries are looking for an asset that cannot be seized or politically distorted, does Bitcoin — with all its volatility — become the inevitable choice, or will the world reinvent a completely new reserve system?
