Who Bought More Gold Than China Last Year?

There's a man in El Salvador named Paolo Ardoino. He runs a crypto company called Tether. Last year, he bought 116 tonnes of gold. The gold sits in a vault somewhere in Switzerland. No outside auditor is allowed inside.

I can't stop thinking about this. When a private company buys that much gold, it tells us something. It tells us they don't trust paper money to hold its value over time. And if they don't trust it, our savings are sitting in the wrong place. Our home equity. Our bond funds. The cash in our brokerage accounts.

The European Central Bank put out a report this week. For the first time since 1996, central banks worldwide now hold more gold than U.S. Treasuries. 27% gold. 22% Treasuries. 1996 was before 9/11. Before two wars in the Middle East. Before the 2008 crash. That's how long it's been since the world owned more gold than our debt. And it didn't shift overnight. It crept.

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But the bigger story was buried inside the report. The biggest gold buyer in the world last year wasn't a country. It was Tether. Poland came in second at about 100 tonnes. Tether bought more than China. More than India. More than Brazil or Kazakhstan put together. Their gold pile now rivals the central bank of Australia.

Think about what that means. Poland has 38 million people. A government. A central bank with decades of history. Tether has a few hundred employees and an office in San Salvador. And Tether bought more gold.

You may have never heard of Tether. Here's what they do. They sell a digital dollar called USDT. Every USDT is supposed to be backed by a real dollar in the bank. To do that, they hold tens of billions in U.S. Treasuries. They are one of the dollar's biggest customers on the planet. Their whole business depends on the dollar staying strong.

Here's what worries me. They are quietly moving their own money into gold. The people closest to the dollar are hedging against it. I don't think most people realize what that means.

Foreign central banks pulled $82 billion in Treasuries out of the New York Fed. That happened between late February and the end of March. It's the lowest level of foreign holdings since 2012. Turkey alone sold or loaned 130 tonnes of gold this spring just to defend its own currency. That's one of the biggest drawdowns we've seen in years.

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I get it. Nobody is shouting about this. The Iran peace deal gets signed Friday. The G7 meets in Évian the same weekend. Those stories own the front page and most of cable news. This story sits below the fold. But the reserve shift is the real signal. Wars get covered. Slow goodbyes don't.

When foreign buyers walk away from Treasuries, the U.S. has to pay more to bring them back. Higher rates means higher mortgage costs for our kids. Lower bond fund values in our retirement accounts. Dollars in our brokerage that buy less next year than they did last year. Our home equity sits on one end of this trade. Our retirement bonds on the other. So does the savings rate at the bank down the street.

So here's the number I keep saying to myself. 116 tonnes. More than the country of Poland. Sitting in a Swiss vault no auditor is allowed to enter. Bought by a company most Americans have never heard of, run by an Italian, headquartered in El Salvador. I read that out loud at my kitchen table last night. It still sounds invented. It isn't.

Think about that chain for a second. An Italian. A crypto company. In El Salvador. Stockpiling gold. In Switzerland. To hedge against the very dollar their business runs on. None of that was true ten years ago. All of it is true now.

Nobody knows where this lands. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Maybe foreign buyers come back next quarter. Maybe Tether sells some of the gold. Maybe the dollar holds the line and this whole thing blows over by fall. But even the firms that exist because of the dollar are buying gold. We owe ourselves a hard look at what we own. And why we own it.

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I keep picturing that locked warehouse somewhere in Switzerland. And the drawers at the New York Fed that used to hold our country's debt — now lighter by $82 billion. We don't get to see inside either room. We just feel the cost later. In the rates on our loans. In the value of our pensions. That's the part that gets me. Not the gold itself. The silence around it. Smart money has already moved. We are the ones still deciding.

More on this tomorrow.

— Lauren
Editor, American Ledger

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