The world's reserve managers are not staging a revolt against the dollar. They are doing something slower and more consequential: methodically redrawing issuer lists, counterparty maps and currency weights under the cover of prudential language. The latest Central Banking Publications survey work, produced with HSBC, shows the pivot has hardened. Geopolitical tension is now the top-ranked risk into 2026, US protectionism is the dominant near-term worry, and the share of managers expecting US bonds to outperform G7 peers has collapsed. This is what gradual de-dollarisation actually looks like.
The headline number is the one that should unsettle the US Treasury. According to Central Banking Publications, only 32.9 percent of reserve managers now expect US bonds to outperform other G7 economies and China, down from 54.3 percent a year earlier. That is not a rotation call from a hedge fund; it is a swing in the stated expectations of the largest, stickiest, most price-insensitive buyers of Treasuries in the world. The mechanism matters less than the direction. When the marginal official buyer stops assuming US outperformance, the term premium (the extra yield investors demand for holding longer-dated bonds) has to do more work.
Geopolitics has been cited as a risk for years. What is new is that citation is now converting to action at scale. Central Banking Publications reports that 82.6 percent of central banks that formally incorporate geopolitical risk made allocation changes in the prior 12 months, and geopolitical tension tops the 2026 risk ranking for 69 of 99 respondents. Read alongside the 44.3 percent who name US protectionist policies as the single most significant 2025 risk, the picture is coherent: managers are hedging the issuer of the reserve currency against the reserve currency itself. Gold accumulation, active fixed-income mandates, custody diversification and cautious renminbi accretion are the tools. Cryptocurrency, tellingly, is not.
The divergence trade, made official
The survey also sharpens a specific, tradeable macro call. Reserve managers expect US–eurozone policy rate divergence to exceed 175 basis points by end-2025, with the Fed funds rate landing between 3.0 and 4.5 percent and the ECB deposit rate between 1.5 and 3.25 percent. This is a high-caliber consensus — the dossier shows no dissent among named forecasters, and the reader should treat it as a one-sided view rather than a spectrum. That matters two ways. First, it is a directional bet on EUR/USD carry and on European duration outperforming US duration. Second, it is the interest-rate mirror of the geopolitical story: if the Fed cannot cut as fast as the ECB because US inflation and tariff pass-through prove stickier, the same protectionism driving allocation shifts also anchors the divergence.
Managers are hedging the issuer of the reserve currency against the reserve currency itself.
The FX intervention data completes the frame. Half of 84 central banks intervened in currency markets over the last 12 months, and stripping out eurozone members — who share the euro and cannot intervene individually — the share rises to 60.9 percent. Active management of the currency book is now the norm, not the exception. Put the pieces together and the operationalisable claims are narrow but sharp: US–eurozone divergence above 175 basis points at end-2025 is the base case per the survey itself; a majority of central banks reporting higher FX and gold reserves in 2025 is the base case; and the trajectory of official US bond demand is negative at the margin. None of these individually breaks the dollar system. Collectively, they describe the erosion of its default setting.
Briefings are synthesised by the Ledger Desk from multiple sources cited in the sidebar. They are distinct from Articles, which are written by named contributors and carry a tracked Calibration Index. The Desk does not currently carry a Brier score; this is a deliberate choice for the v0.1 editorial layer and will be revisited.