For three years the gold story was about who was buying. In 2026 it has become a story about where the metal sleeps at night.
On Tuesday the Monetary Authority of Singapore opened its national currency vault, with room for 500 tons of bullion, to foreign central banks and sovereign entities, and threw in a tax break for the wholesale gold trade to sweeten the deal. The launch lands three weeks after Bloomberg reported that wealthy American, European and Middle Eastern investors are already shipping their bars to the city-state, where privately held gold has grown 16-fold since 2014 to more than 800 tons!
None of this will surprise regular readers. We first wrote that Singapore was taking steps to become a global gold hub back in July 2014, when the grand total stored there was a rounding error, and we have spent much of this year documenting the great custody migration out of New York:
Unprecedented move of gold "east" in the past year, as hundreds of tons of gold leave the NY Fed and end up at the Bank of England (where they then diffuse to the rest of the world) https://t.co/zNlYAaTvlO pic.twitter.com/NasBZQT6ov
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 16, 2026
Well, some of it is now diffusing a lot further east t
