Donald Trump has a thing for gold. Long before politics, the president’s brand was gilded—captured in tours of his gold-and-marble Trump Tower triplex, all leafed ceilings and shimmering mirrors. And since returning to the big stage, he’s shown off new 24-karat accents in the Oval Office on video. “Best Oval Office ever,” he bragged in one clip. Today’s surprise, though, isn’t about taste; it’s about math. Venezuela—the archetypal liquid-gold petrostate—also has actual gold.
Venezuela’s official gold hoard is roughly 161 tons in recent World Gold Council tallies—worth around $23.2 billion at today’s prices—before you even get to the London subplot. Because about 31 tons of that bullion sit in a vault in the British capital, a hoard worth the same as a medium-sized oil field.
Sometimes the liquid gold is just… gold.
Common Knowledge
On the right and left, the case is oil-first. Trump said the U.S. would “run the country” of Venezuela “until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” and promised to “rebuild the oil infrastructure…paid for by the oil companies.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. has “tremendous leverage” and will control the proceeds from the sale of millions of Venezuelan barrels to help stabilize the country (and target China). He’s also sketched a three-phase plan—stability, recovery, then transition.
The left calls it an oil grab in search of a pretext. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy actually agreed the move is “mostly about oil and natural resources” but that “Donald Trump’s entire foreign policy is corrupt,” while also blasting the plan as “insane.” Senate leader Chuck Schumer labeled the strike “a violation of the law” and questioned the idea that U.S. firms could simply fix Venezuela’s fields as advertised.
Uncommon Knowledge
So much for the oil. Venezuela’s gold stack is big enough to convert into oil-sized numbers.
The Bank of England holds about 31 tons of Venezuelan bullion, according to UK court documents cited by The Guardian. In 2020, the courts pegged that stash at around $1.95 billion. Gold’s gone vertical since, and is valued at around $4,469/oz. today, which makes it now worth around $4.45 billion. Translate that into barrels at today’s Brent crude prices and you get around 70 million barrels—a tidy, midsize oil field’s worth of value stacked under Threadneedle Street.
The World Gold Council’s country tables show 161 tons of official Venezuelan gold holdings in the most recent tallies for 2024. At today’s spot, that’s around $23 billion, or 370 million barrels at today’s Brent. There is a caveat: Venezuela’s central bank later reported around 53 tons at the end of 2024, reflecting sales and accounting that diverge from earlier tallies.
Of course, the math is nowhere near that simple. But there’s a backstory to how important gold bars became to Venezuela. Between 2013 and 2016, as the economy buckled, 113 tons of Venezuelan central-bank gold—about $5.2 billion even then—flowed to Switzerland for refining. Then it stopped, as sanctions tightened and stocks thinned. Nevertheless, when oil sputtered, gold paid the bills.
Venezuela’s proven oil reserves are still a mind-bending 303 billion barrels on paper. That’s nearly a fifth of the world’s total, yet its production system has struggled in recent years. Analysts will argue over how much is truly recoverable at today’s prices, but that’s almost the point: reserves are theoretical; bullion is cash-convertible now. And today, the one-million-ounce London pile alone equates to billions of dollars without drilling a thing.
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