Central banks turn cautious on the dollar for the first time since 2023, OMFIF survey finds
A decade-long run of reserve managers piling into Treasuries is bending: more central banks now plan to trim dollar allocations than to add to them over the next ten years.
For nearly two decades the direction of travel in global reserves has been a single sentence: more dollars. That sentence has begun to lose its verbs. A survey of public investors published this week by the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum finds that more central banks now plan to cut their dollar allocations over the next ten years than increase them — a first in the three years the forum has been tracking reserve managers' long-term intentions, with results circulated on 9 July 2026 via Unusual Whales.
The shift is small in absolute terms but symbolically heavy. Reserve portfolios are glacially managed: a single percentage-point reallocation can move trillions in Treasury holdings over a decade. What has changed is the direction of the marginal respondent. Political risk — sanctions, weaponisation of payment systems, frozen sovereign balances — is now cited as a first-order constraint by reserve managers who, until recently, treated it as a footnote.
The signal in the survey
The forum's Global Public Investor series, which records reserve managers' ten-year intentions, had run three waves without producing a net-negative dollar cohort. The 2026 wave breaks that pattern. The mechanism is straightforward: respondents are asked whether they expect to increase, decrease or hold their dollar share steady over the coming decade. For the first time, the "decrease" column outweighs the "increase" column. The headline crossing was reported by Unusual Whales at 03:58 UTC on 9 July 2026.
That a majority of reserve managers say they intend to reduce dollar exposure does not mean they will liquidate. Gold, the euro, the renminbi and a cluster of Asian currencies will absorb much of the rotation. But each percentage point shifted out of Treasuries is a percentage point that does not roll back into the bid for US government paper at the next auction. The compounding effect, over ten years, is what the survey is measuring.
The political-risk driver
Reserve managers in emerging-market economies have spent the past five years watching the United States and its allies freeze the dollar balances of adversaries and even allies under sanctions regimes targeting Russia, Iran and, episodically, Afghan and Syrian accounts. Those episodes turned a theoretical risk into an operational one: any treasury official managing a war-chest sized for several months of imports now has to ask whether the asset class chosen for safety remains accessible in a crisis.
The shift is not framed by respondents as ideological. It is framed as portfolio hygiene. The same respondents who report wanting to trim dollar share also report plans to hold or grow gold reserves — an asset with no central-bank gatekeeper — and to expand currency diversification into euro and renminbi-denominated instruments. The implication is not a flight from dollar assets into anti-dollar activism. It is a flight from concentration risk into a more plural reserve architecture.
A market reading from the same week
The survey lands against a backdrop of stress signals in US risk assets. On 8 July 2026, Bank of America described the S&P 500 as "statistically expensive on 17 of 20 metrics," trading rich on eight of those against the late-1990s tech-bubble peak, per Unusual Whales' coverage of the bank's take. Central-bank reserve decisions and equity valuations run on different clocks: one is a decade-long allocator's view, the other is a quarter-by-quarter tape. But for the same buyer profile — global pools of long-dated capital — both readings point in the same direction. US assets are expensive in their own right and increasingly exposed to political-risk premia.
Separately, Federal Reserve minutes circulated via Crypto Briefing on 8 July show support for rate cuts weakening as inflation pressures rise. A higher-for-longer policy stance in Washington would, all else equal, support the dollar — but it also raises the carrying cost of holding Treasuries for reserve managers who fund themselves in weaker currencies. The mechanical effect partially offsets the safe-haven effect.
What remains uncertain
The survey is an opinion instrument. It captures what reserve managers say they intend to do, not what their treasury operations actually execute. Historically, the gap is sizeable: intention surveys tend to lead realised reallocations by one to three years, and many shifts are reversed before they hit the tape. What the data does establish, however, is that the consensus expectation has changed. Until 2023, the consensus was dollar-up. From 2026 onward, the consensus is dollar-down — a meaningful change in the priors of the asset allocators who set the marginal price of US government debt.
The structural stakes are considerable. The dollar's reserve status confers a persistent borrowing subsidy to the United States — every percentage point of reserve currency premium is worth tens of billions of dollars in interest savings annually. A slow, partial erosion of that premium would not produce a crisis; it would produce a higher equilibrium cost of capital for the US government, distributed across the decade. Gold and the renminbi would be the proximate beneficiaries. The euro would do well by default. The Treasury market — already contending with auctionable supply and a yield curve under strain — would face one more persistent headwind.
What the sources do not specify is the speed of any reallocation. The thread material captures the survey's directional finding and the equity-market context; it does not give a quantitative reallocation forecast. Readers should treat the survey as an indicator of intent at the world's reserve desks, not as a transaction tape for the year ahead.
— Desk note: Monexus frames this as a slow re-pricing of dollar hegemony rather than a sudden rupture, foregrounding the political-risk drivers that wire coverage tends to under-weight.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/CryptoBriefing
- https://t.me/BBCWorldoffl
- https://t.me/BBCWorldoffl