Serbia expands gold reserves by 9 tonnes

After Hungary and Poland, Serbia has also recently added gold to its reserves added. On the advice of President Aleksandar Vucic, the central bank bought 9 tons of gold in October. As a result, the country's total gold reserves rose to 30.4 tonnes, to 10% of the total reserves. For years, the central bank has been adding bullion to its reserves, but never as much in one month as it does now. It also has plans to further diversify its foreign exchange reserves towards euros.

The governor of the Serbian central bank, Jorgovanka Tabakovic, announced the purchase on Thursday. "We have completed the gold purchase and as a result, Serbia is safer today with 30.4 tonnes of gold, worth around €1.3 billion. At the moment, we have no plans to buy more." The central bank paid €395 million for the precious metal. That amounts to a Gold price of €1,367 per troy ounce and €43,950 per kilo.

European countries buy gold

More European countries have been buying gold lately. For example, more than a year ago, Poland started Buy gold, in order to increase its gold stock this year. double up to 228 tons. Hungary repatriated in the spring of 2018 its gold stock of just over 3 tonnes, in order to expandable to 31.5 tonnes. With the purchase of 9,000 kilos, Serbia is the third Eastern European country to expand its gold reserves.

Several countries are withdrawing their gold reserves due to increasing economic and geopolitical uncertainty. The precious metal is seen by central banks as the safest reserve, because it has no counterparty risk. Incidentally, this argument only applies if the precious metal is actually held at the bank's own central bank. For this reason, more and more countries are withdrawing their gold reserves from London and New York.

In recent years, Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, among others, have already brought back some of their gold to their own countries. Also in Romania Earlier this year, there were already calls to repatriate the national gold reserves. We will continue to follow this trend closely.

Serbia adds 9 tonnes of gold to reserves

This contribution comes from Geotrendlines