There have been huge monetary and political changes for the Republic of Croatia this year already, with the country being the first to ever join both Schengen and the Eurozone on the very same day. When it comes to money, or at least items of value, gold is something that the country has allegedly not really had on its radar for a great many years, until December 2022, that is.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, Krishan Gopaul, an analyst at the World Gold Council, tweeted that ”The Central Bank of Croatia bought almost 2t of #gold in December. Prior to that they were not reporting any gold holdings, and haven’t since 2001. And this is another Eastern European central bank who had bought gold in 2022.”
While many will likely focus not on the topic of gold but on the fact that he referred to Croatia as Eastern Europe (let’s not go there now), this is interesting because the country hadn’t reported any gold holdings for such a long time now.
The gold was immediately forwarded by the Croatian National Bank to the European Central Bank because since January 1st, 2023, upon joining the Eurozone, the Croatian National Bank has also participated in the management of part of the ECB’s international reserves, as do all other central banks of Eurozone member states.
To be clear, the statute of the European System of Central Banks and the European Central Bank stipulates that the national central banks of Eurozone member states must transfer part of their international (foreign exchange) reserves to the ECB when joining the Eurosystem. As such, the Croatian National Bank also had to transfer part of its assets as well, according to what was explained by the bank for tportal.
National central banks of the Eurozone pay money in relation to the existing balance of international reserves of the ECB, namely 85 percent of the amount in US dollars and 15 percent in gold.
The Croatian National Bank was supposed to transfer 639.9 million euros to the ECB, that is, 580.1 million in US dollars and 96 million euros worth of gold, which the central bank did not have at that time.
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