Authors: Michael Galant and Ivana Vasic-Lalovic
This article was published by Inter Press Service on October 15, 2025. If anyone wants to reprint it, please include a link to the original.
With prices at record highs, the IMF should use its gold reserves to fund much-needed support for developing countries.
Countries across the Global South face an accelerating climate crisis, tepid growth, and unsustainable levels of debt. Yet hopes of finding support at the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Annual Meetings in Washington next week are dim. The IMF is tightening its purse strings — even as it leaves untouched a vast treasure of more than 3,000 tons of gold that offers a prime opportunity to stabilize the global economy.
While IMF lending yielded record income in FY2024, fears that Trump will cut off funding — combined with the organization’s exposure on an ill-advised, US-directed mega-loan to Argentina — have prompted the Fund to reassess its assistance to those most in need.
At last year’s meetings, the IMF implemented a system of tiered interest rates on loans made through the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT) — a formerly interest-free lending facility for low-income countries. The Fund also elected to maintain (if slightly modify) its controversial “surcharge” policy, which generates revenue for the IMF by charging onerous fees to highly indebted middle-income countries. Income from surcharges is now effectively being used to fund the PRGT, forcing these distressed countries to subsidize the Fund’s concessional lending.
Yet while the IMF squeezes financing from the very countries it is meant to support, it is, in fact, sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of idle firepower.
When the Fund was founded in 1944, members were required to pay at least a quarter of their initial contribution in gold, which at the time was the foundation of the global monetary order. The gold standard is long gone, but the IMF still holds 90.5 million ounces — or over 3,000 tons — of the precious metal, historically held at the central banks of major shareholders.
Critically, this gold is still on the IMF’s books at a price determined in 1944: roughly $48 per ounce. This year, amid geopolitical uncertainty and increased demand from central banks, prices soared to all-time highs; for the first time ever, gold prices now exceed $4,000 per ounce.
In other words, the IMF’s gold reserves are worth over 85 times more than its accounting would suggest.
Selling just 1.5 percent of these holdings would cover the income generated from all surcharge payments through 2030. Selling 10 percent would cover the PRGT’s entire current lending envelope for a decade.
