The five-year ledger he gave is the story. Reserves rose from about $35 billion to more than $72 billion; the physical gold stock from 360 to 439 tonnes; gold's share from about 60% to about 90%. Uzbekistan mines about 120 tonnes a year and the central bank has a priority right to buy it.
By the bank's own adequacy tests the book is large: about 3.4 times the IMF's minimum benchmark, 14 months of imports, 4.4 times short-term external debt. Olimov's order of priorities was safety first, then liquidity, then return; in Spot's account the high gold share creates a separate link between reserve management and domestic liquidity through open-market and currency operations.
"The question is no longer only how we accumulate reserves. Increasingly it is how we manage them as a portfolio," he said, in Spot's account.
The portfolio he means is small. At $1.766 billion, Gazeta.uz reports, the securities book is about 2.4% of the total, run with an external manager and, since 2020, inside the World Bank's RAMP programme. Its next move is beyond US Treasury bills. "This means we plan to go beyond US Treasury bills and invest in other types of highly liquid assets. These may be sovereign bonds, bonds of subnational authorities and other fixed-income instruments," he said. For 2026 and 2027 the bank is working with international financial institutions on a strategic asset allocation, an investment policy and a risk-management system.
Earlier on Friday, in a second Gazeta.uz item, the bank said it had not finished with inflation: the policy rate stays at 14% and monetary conditions stay tight until disinflation is sustainable and the target is reached. August inflation was 6.2%, the 2026 average is expected at about 6.5%, and the 5% target is dated to the end of 2027.
A reserve that is 90% metal holds almost nothing a foreign treasury or a correspondent bank can freeze, and it got there by policy and by price: the bank added 79 tonnes in five years under its priority right to the country's output, and the metal's price did the rest. Washington's new tariff and sanctions law, which counts Uzbekistan's Russian gas by volume and makes sanctions on foreign banks dealing with Russian state banks mandatory within 30 days, with a Treasury exception, reaches correspondent accounts and dollar assets held in the United States; it does not reach bullion in a vault in Tashkent. In neither outlet's account did Olimov mention the law; he gave portfolio reasons for the change. The reasons stand on their own, and so does the timing.
The portfolio he means is small.
What the design changes is the 10%. On Friday's figures that is about $7 billion, of which $1.766 billion is in securities; the rest sits in instruments the two accounts do not itemise. Spreading the securities from one issuer's bills across sovereign and subnational bonds raises return and spreads counterparty exposure, at the cost of the liquidity a T-bill gives on the day a currency needs defending.
The number that moves the whole book is not in Tashkent. At the bank's own valuation the gold is worth about $148 million a tonne; a fall of a fifth in the metal takes $13 billion off the headline reserve without a single transaction. That is the price of a 90% share, and the bank has chosen to pay it.
The watch: the bank's next reserve print, the strategic asset allocation it says it is writing, and 28 October, the next rate meeting.