The Vast Gold Hoards Held by German Population
The comments below are an edited and abridged synopsis of an article by Ronan Manley
While the Chinese and Indian populations are known for their insatiable appetite for gold, there is one market in the West that garners less attention than China and India: Germany.
The vast size of Germans’ gold holdings was clarified in a recent survey commissioned by Reisebank. They currently own a staggering 8,918 tonnes of gold, worth about €330 billion. This figure is gold held by private citizens and does not include the gold reserves of Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank, which amount to an additional 3,370 tonnes.
Adding the 8,918 tonnes of gold held by private German citizens to the 3,370 tonnes of gold held by Germany’s central bank gives an overall total of 12,228 tonnes of gold held across the private and central bank sectors in Germany. This is nearly 7% of all the world’s aboveground gold reserves.
Adding privately held German gold to the 25,000 tonnes of gold estimated to be held in India, and the more than 20,000 tonnes of gold estimated to be held in China, means that there are at least 55,000 tonnes of gold held within the borders of these three countries. So even though China and India make the news more often for their gold demand, gold imports and overall gold holdings, the German public are approaching the league of private gold holders in India and China, a point that is sometimes crowded out by the media coverage of Asian gold demand and the East’s gold holdings figures.
Up for discussion: Germans hold 4,925 tonnes of gold bars and gold coins; the majority of Germans’ gold is not stored at home; motivations for gold holding; and depth and sophistication in the German gold market.