Why is so much gold coming into the United States? A critical analysis.

“There can be no other criterion, no other standard than gold. Yes, gold which never changes, which can be shaped into ingots, bars, coins, which has no nationality, and which is eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value par excellence.” – Charles de Gaulle

Based on consumption import data from the U.S. Geological Survey, the United States imported approximately $16.5 billion worth of gold, equivalent to about 200 metric tons, in 2023. The primary countries of origin for these imports were Canada ($6.84 billion), Switzerland ($1.64 billion), Colombia ($1.42 billion), Mexico ($1.18 billion), and South Africa ($943 million). This excludes monetary gold. The Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) aligns with these figures, noting the U.S. as the 8th largest gold importer globally in 2023.

Data for 2024 and 2025, thus far, suggest a significant uptick in gold imports. Posts on X and reports from sources like CNBC and the World Gold Council indicate a massive movement of gold into the United States starting in late 2024, when over 600 tons (approximately 20 million ounces) of gold was transported into New York vaults from December 2024 onward, much of it previously stored in London. In January alone, X posts and trade analyses suggest U.S. gold imports hit $30.4 billion—double the 2020 pandemic peak. Switzerland is highlighted as a primary source.

There’s lots of speculation on these massive amounts of gold, but nobody really knows what’s going on. As of March 15, the U.S. national debt is approximately $36 trillion, and the U.S. government holds 261.5 million troy ounces of gold, primarily stored in Fort Knox and other depositories. Currently, this gold is officially valued on the U.S. balance sheet at $42.22 per troy ounce, set in 1973. However, the market price of gold went over $3000 last week, before dropping back a bit. At $2900 (approximately $100 lower than it is now), U.S. gold reserves would be valued at $758 billion. To add perspective, Congress has approved $175 billion in emergency aid to Ukraine, or just over a quarter of its gold reserves (if revalued to the market price).

To cover the $36 trillion in public debt, gold would need to be revalued significantly higher. The calculation is simple: divide the total debt by the number of ounces of gold held in reserves. So, $36,000,000,000,000 ÷ 261,500,000 ounces = approximately $137,667 per troy ounce. This means gold would need to be revalued to roughly $137,667 per ounce to theoretically offset the entire U.S. national debt, assuming no other factors change. Keep in mind, U.S. obligations also include unfunded liabilities (like Social Security and Medicare). This could push the total fiscal imbalance much higher—some estimates suggest $244.8 trillion when these are included.

The United States government has officially revalued gold (meaning it has changed the official price at which gold is pegged in relation to the U.S. dollar) three times in its history, but nothing on the scale that would presumably need to happen next. A jump to $137,667 per ounce would be unprecedented, likely triggering a global monetary reset, a huge transfer of wealth, altering gold’s role in the financial system. Historically, revaluations have been tied to monetary policy shifts and economic crises in the United States, and below is a detailed account:

1834 – Gold Revaluation Act (Coinage Act of 1834) – Changed gold from $19.39 per troy ounce (based on the Coinage Act of 1792) to $20.67. This resulted in a 6.3% devaluation of the dollar. The original 1792 bimetallic standard undervalued gold relative to silver, causing gold coins to disappear from circulation (Gresham’s Law). After silver’s market value shifted, Congress revalued gold to encourage its use in coinage.

1934 – Gold Reserve Act – Changed gold from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35.00. During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt acted under the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, following Executive Order 6102 (April 5, 1933), which confiscated private gold and took the U.S. off the domestic gold standard. On January 31, 1934, FDR devalued the dollar by raising the official gold price by 69.3%, from $20.67 to $35 per ounce. This revaluation aimed to stimulate the economy by increasing the money supply and countering deflation.

1971 – End of Bretton Woods (Nixon Shock): On August 15, 1971, President Nixon suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold, ending the Bretton Woods system. The official price was still $35 per ounce until 1973, when the U.S. raised it to $42.22 per ounce as a bookkeeping adjustment. Meanwhile, the market price had already taken off to $70.

To figure out what’s happening behind the scenes, it’s helpful to broaden our perspective through the lens of geopolitics and history.

Russia and the U.S. have Flip-Flopped

There’s striking symmetry in how Russia and the U.S. have “flip-flopped” in their gold-reserve trajectories over the past century. Pre-World War I, Russia was the gold kingpin, and the U.S. was an upstart still building its stash. Russia had the largest gold reserves in the world, peaking at 1,311 tons in 1914. Between the Russian Empire’s Siberian mines and its adoption of the gold standard in 1897, it had grown into a monetary titan. Meanwhile, the U.S. had just 200-300 tons, bolstered by the California Gold Rush, but hadn’t yet centralized gold under a dominant federal system.

By the 1920s, though, the Bolsheviks had lost or spent much of their 1,311 tons of gold they seized from the Russian Tsar. War Communism ditched the gold standard, and gold was sold off and lost. On the contrary, World War I and II turned the United States into a gold magnet, absorbing Europe’s stocks, Russia’s stash, and cementing Bretton Woods dominance. After World War II, Russian reserves plummeted and U.S. reserves skyrocketed, hitting 6,000 tons by 1933 and peaking at 20,663 tons in 1952. By 1950, the U.S. had 50 times Russia’s reserves.

Then the opposite started happening. While the Soviets clawed back, rebuilding its gold reserves through mining (e.g., Kolyma Gulags) from 1950 to 1991, the U.S. shed half its peak gold hoard, while spending fiat like drunken sailors…or should I say “Saylors”? Reserves fell from 20,663 tons in 1952 to 9,070 tons by 1971 (Nixon Shock), and then stabilized at 8,133 tons by 1980. Bretton Woods redemptions and the shift to fiat currency ended the U.S.’s gold accumulation era, but this didn’t stop it from spending. Fiat money creation took off, especially after the 2008 financial crisis.

From 1991 to the present, Russia has been rising and the U.S. stagnating. Per the World Gold Council, Russian reserves surged from 384 tons in 2000 to 2,336 tons by Q4 of last year. Putin’s strategy—buying domestic production (500+ tons/year) and hedging against U.S. sanctions—has made Russia a top-five holder, closing in on France and Italy. Meanwhile, U.S reserves have been flatlined at 8,133 tons since the 1970s. The symmetry is surreal, so much that it looks orchestrated…

1914: Russia: 1,311 tons | U.S.: 200–300 tons → Russia leads by 1,000+ tons.

1952: Russia: 200–400 tons | U.S.: 20,663 tons → U.S. leads by 20,000 tons.

2000: Russia: 384 tons | U.S.: 8,133 tons → U.S. leads by 7,749 tons.

2025: Russia: 2,336 tons | U.S.: 8,133 tons → U.S. leads by 5,797 tons.

As of the end of 2024, Russia has 2,336 tons, China has 2,280 tons, India has 876 tons, Brazil has 129.7 tons, and South Africa has 125.4 tons. The sum of these unified nations is 5,747 tons! It is said, China has a lot more than it officially reports. And as of  2025, the BRICS recently added five new nations:

Egypt (joined in 2024) – 126.5 tons of gold

Ethiopia (joined in 2024) – 0.8 tons of gold

Iran (joined in 2024) – 190 tons of gold

United Arab Emirates (UAE) (joined in 2024) – 74.4 tons

Indonesia (joined in January 2025) – 78.6 tons

This brings the BRICS nations to a total  of 6217.3 tons! What this means is that the BRICS nations combined are closing in on the USA fast. I repeat, though, China is purported to have a lot more than they officially report.

When Russia Fell, So Did the Christian Empire

Where it gets even more interesting is Russia was the last absolute Christian monarch to fall, in 1917, during the Russian Revolution. This date marked a major turning point in the world. It ended centuries of absolute autocratic rule underpinned by Russian Orthodox Christianity and marked the beginning of a major decline in the Catholic Church. While a subject of historical debate, the fall of the Tsar and rise of the Bolsheviks was fueled by Marxist propaganda and funding from outsiders, such as Jacob Henry Schiff (see previous post), an American Jew and leader of the banking firm Kuhn, Loeb, and Company at the time.

The end of Christian authoritarianism, the end of the absolute Christian monarch, was met with the U.S. capitalizing on World War I and II, and the rise of “democracy” (a loaded word in propaganda). World War I crushed Germany and Russia (even though Russia was on the winning side). World War II resulted in the U.S. as the sole world empire, and Israel as a nation. In this context, the idea of the United States as the new Israel (Puritans like John Winthrop, in his 1630 sermon, A Model of Christian Charity) has real concrete meaning, and the world wars look more like steps in a long-term coup d’état of Christian empires. Regardless of how it was instigated or how it naturally emerged, we are now living in a post-modern anti-Christian western order that was seeded by debt, by fiat.

Think about it. Christianity is a religion where people believe that Christ was the messiah, while Judaism is a religion that believes Christ was a fraud, not the messiah that they are still awaiting. These are beliefs, not ethnicities. The word Christian essentially elicits the idea of pro-Christ, while the word Jew elicits the idea of anti-Christ. Both are belief systems, first and foremost, which have been replaced with the idea of ethnicity, at least for Jews. I was playing around with the interactive World Religions Map (PBS) and I realized how closely the growing Non-Religious world aligned with Christianity. Almost a perfect overlay. According to the Catholic News Agency, the total number of Catholic priests in the world have been on the decline, and the worst reduction of priests was in Europe. Christian killings are on the rise, too.

Last Sunday, a person who claimed to be a Jew by birth, left a thoughtful comment on my post, and part of it follows: “…For me, one item stands as a defining concept as initiating all subsequent events: The exile of the Jews of Judah and Samaria to Babylon cemented their religious and cultural beliefs, incorporating the subjective belief in their ‘Chosen People’ status. It was this collective identity which was subsequently carried to Rome with the Roman exile and then across Europe. The rest, as they say, is history. Maintaining a separate identity colored with the ‘Chosen People’ status created an aversion to assimilation. Inevitably the separateness and exclusivity of the group elicited animosity, disparaging judgementalism leading to anti-semitism in all its forms…”

Fact is, over the last century—in the West—Christian monarchy has evolved into liberal democracy. This was seeded through the privatization of government finance. The Federal Reserve is a private corporation separate from government. It was put into place to manage fiat, while gold is safely held by the Treasury and disconnected from the process. The “Federal Reserve” is neither Federal—because it is not owned or operated by the government—nor is it a reserve of anything, with no monetary holdings. Its main job is to manage fiat as it slowly devalues against gold. It does this by conducting monetary policy, promoting financial stability, supervising and regulating financial institutions, fostering payment and settlement systems, etc. And is therefore a service.

It all started with Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836), the founder of the London branch of the Jewish Rothschild banking dynasty. He used a strategy that depended on government loans, and international trade, with gold playing a key role as a medium of exchange and a store of value in his operations. His most famous dealings with gold were tied to wartime finance, arbitrage, and facilitating payments across borders, leveraging the family’s superior network of couriers. Nathan’s breakthrough came when he became a pivotal financier for the British government during the Napoleonic Wars.

Nathan would buy gold and silver from markets like the East India Company and European sources, often at a discount, and then sell it to the British government or delivered it directly to Wellington at a profit. Britain needed gold to pay its troops and allies (e.g., Portugal and Spain), as paper currency was less trusted abroad. He began smuggling gold and silver bullion to the Duke of Wellington’s army on the Iberian Peninsula, bypassing Napoleon’s Continental Blockade, which restricted trade with Britain. The Rothschilds’ European network—siblings in Frankfurt, Paris, Vienna, and Naples—enabled them to move it efficiently.

By the 1820s, Nathan’s firm became a hub for bullion trading. He secured a contract to refine gold for the Bank of England in 1824, processing raw gold into standardized bars and coins, earning fees and cementing his influence over Britain’s gold supply. Then, Nathan’s bank issued loans to governments and merchants, often secured or repaid in gold. For example, after Waterloo, he financed Britain’s postwar recovery, repaid in gold or gold-backed instruments. His ability to move and store gold across borders gave him an edge over rivals, as gold was the currency of international trade.

What the Rothschilds really did was show the world how private wealth could prop up nations. This public-private partnership then precipitated the rise of central banks. Russia’s story with central banking is different, however. Its first central bank didn’t happen until 1860 under Tsar Alexander II. The State Bank of the Russian Empire was fully state-controlled and grew out of a need to modernize Russia’s economy after the Crimean War. Private bankers like the Rothschilds had less influence in Russia than in Europe—Nathan Rothschild, for instance, dealt with Russia indirectly through London markets, not by embedding in its system. Russia’s centralized power kept foreign banking dynasties at arm’s length.

After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, The State Bank of the Russian Empire was absorbed into the Soviet system, becoming the Gosbank in 1923. Gosbank was a different beast—less a central bank in the Western sense and more a tool of the planned economy, a command economy, controlling all financial flows under the Communist Party. It was a centralized approach where the state, under the direction of the Communist Party, controlled the production, distribution, and pricing of goods and services. It didn’t set interest rates or manage reserves like the Fed or Bank of England; it executed state directives. This lasted until the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.

Summary

A massive amount of gold has flooded into the U.S. since late 2024. The original five BRICS nations have added five additional member nations which have catapulted their combined gold reserves to considerably more than the United States. Gold is emerging once again as the backbone of world trade, since irredeemable debt is no longer a viable option, and the U.S. is now at a geo-economic disadvantage in the world. Russia and the U.S. have curiously flipflopped. The last absolute Christian monarch ended in 1917, which also marked the decline of the pro-Christ world order and the rise of an anti-Christ system structured like an organized crime syndicate. And it looks like some kind of global economic reset is imminent, as a result of it. Will the new world order continue along the same trajectory, or will the West revert to the divine right of kings?

After all is said and done, Charles de Gaulle was right…there can be no other criterion, no other standard than gold for a world of nations that wants to engage in trade together. Empires are not made of debt, but of gold, and this is Biblical. It’s common sense too. Trump likes gold. He has gold-minded people on his team. What does Trump know? Who is he working for? And who is working for him? It seems we will be finding out sooner rather than later. Stay tuned and get prepared insofar as it is possible.

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