Poland and Hungary recently surprised Western world by making a purchase at gold market, Bloomberg reports.

Usually central banks buy this precious metal, in order to diversify assets. The gold can help to stabilize economy in times of market turmoil, as well as to protect from inflation. Besides, gold also has negative correlation with dollar.

It shall be noted that countries’ gold reserves grew recently, mostly due to purchases by such countries as Russia, China and Kazakhstan. Now there are about 33000 tons of gold in world’s banks, which is fifth of all mined metal.

Purchase made by Poland and Hungary was first significant acquisition in EU in last decade. Experts assume that these countries want to protect itself from possible EU sanctions or currency crisis. Hungary itself announced that it is purchasing gold to protect its wealth and bring gold reserves in correspondence with other nations. Share of gold in reserves of Poland and Hungary is about 4% today. For Germany, Italy and France this share is at least 58%.

In any case, such purchases will not be able to influence prices a lot, analytics assume.