BSP’s gold sales: High-stakes gambit
Was it a good move? It may have been a reasonable one, executed with orthodox central banking logic, and not the reckless liquidation critics have painted it to be.
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Was it a good move? It may have been a reasonable one, executed with orthodox central banking logic, and not the reckless liquidation critics have painted it to be.
Between the beginning of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s term in 2022 and early 2025, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) sold a total of 54.95 metric tons of the country’s gold reserves.
The gold was sold in two major transactions — 25 metric tons (approximately 24.95 tons) in the first half of 2024 and 24.95 metric tons in March 2025 — making the Philippines the single largest central bank gold seller in the world during a stretch when nearly everyone else was buying the precious metal.
Overall, was it a good move? It may have been a reasonable one, executed with orthodox central banking logic, and not the reckless liquidation critics have painted it to be.
But “reasonable” is not the same as “vindicated,” and the BSP would be doing itself a favor by publishing exactly what the gold proceeds were converted into and what they’ve earned since — rather than leaving Filipinos to guess whether prudence and profit ever actually met.
China, Turkey, India, Poland and Russia were stacking up bullion while the BSP was unloading it.
BSP Governor Eli Remolona Jr. called it “active reserve management,” insisting that the bank “took advantage of the higher prices of gold in the market and generated additional income without compromising the primary objectives for holding gold.”
The 2024 tranche moved at roughly $2,000 to $2,400 an ounce. The March 2025 batch went for $2,338 to $2,427.
That is not $1.77 billion or P100 billion that vanished from the treasury. The BSP did not lose money it once held; it converted a non-yielding metal into dollars at a price that, in hindsight, was too low and those proceeds went straight into the Gross International Reserves, which rose from $103.8 billion at the end of 2023 to $107.9 billion by August 2024.
Whether the BSP made a smart call by selling roughly 50 metric tons of gold across 2024 and early 2025 depends on which question is being asked. If the question is “did gold keep rising after we sold,” the answer is an emphatic yes.
Gold has more than doubled since the March 2025 tranche, briefly touching an intraday high near $5,595 an ounce in January this year before settling above $4,000. Judged purely against that trajectory, the BSP’s timing looked poor.
Proceeds flow to FX stock
But that is not the question a central bank asks when managing reserves. The real question is what the BSP did with the proceeds, and whether converting a non-yielding metal into working capital actually made the Gross International Reserves portfolio better off.
Here the case for the BSP is stronger than the headline losses suggest.
Gold sits in the GIR earning nothing — no interest, no coupon, no yield of any kind. It only “returns” something when its price rises, and even then only on paper, unrealized, until sold.
The dollars generated by the 2024 and 2025 sales did not vanish into a vault; they became part of the GIR’s foreign currency-denominated components, the largest of which is a portfolio of foreign-issued securities, primarily short- to medium-term sovereign and supranational debt, the kind of instrument that yields actual interest income year after year.
The BSP reporting on reserve movements has repeatedly cited “net income from international investments” as a driver of GIR growth, distinct from currency valuation swings. That income stream, however modest against a nearly $111-billion reserve pool, is money gold itself could never have generated while it sat idle.
The trouble is that the BSP has not published, in any disaggregated form — that is, presenting information in a broken-down, detailed, or individual manner rather than as a single, summarized total — how much of that investment income is specifically traceable to the reinvested gold-sale proceeds.
Reserved accounting
Reserve accounting doesn’t work that way. Dollars from a bullion sale get pooled with dollars from OFW remittances, BPO inflows, foreign borrowings, and trade receipts, then allocated across the same portfolio of securities and deposits.
Asking “how much profit did the gold money specifically make” is a bit like asking which glass of water in a reservoir came from which cloud. The honest answer is that no one — not the BSP, not outside analysts — can isolate that figure with precision, and the central bank’s public disclosures have never tried to.
What can be said is that the reserve composition shifted exactly the way the BSP said it would.
GIR share
Gold’s share of the GIR actually rose again through 2025 as global prices climbed, even after the sales, ending the year with gold holdings still valued near $18.6 billion and up sharply on the strength of the price surge the BSP is now accused of having missed.
That matters because it undercuts the idea that Governor Remolona’s team liquidated a strategic hedge out of desperation.
What they did was trim a position that was already appreciating, redeploy part of it to yield-bearing assets, and still hold a gold stockpile that has itself become one of the GIR’s fastest-growing components in dollar terms. That is a coherent portfolio rebalancing story, not a fire sale.
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