What is the Gold Standard  Economy  Monetary Policy 

By Nick Lioudis Updated March 04, 2022  Reviewed By Michael J Boyle  Fact Checked By Marcus Reeves

The gold standard is a monetary system where a country's currency or paper money has a value directly linked to gold. With the gold standard, countries agreed to convert paper money into a fixed amount of gold. A country that uses the gold standard sets a fixed price for gold and buys and sells gold at that price. That fixed price is used to determine the value of the currency. For example, if the U.S. sets the price of gold at $500 an ounce, the value of the dollar would be 1/500th of an ounce of gold.

The gold standard is not currently used by any government. Britain stopped using the gold standard in 1931, and the U.S. followed suit in 1933, finally abandoning the remnants of the system in 1973.12 The gold standard was completely replaced by fiat money, a term to describe currency that is used because of a government's order, or fiat, that the currency must be accepted as a means of payment. In the U.S., for instance, the dollar is fiat money, and for Nigeria, it is the naira.

The appeal of a gold standard is that it arrests control of the issuance of money out of the hands of imperfect human beings. With the physical quantity of gold acting as a limit to that issuance, a society can follow a simple rule to avoid the evils of inflation. The goal of monetary policy is not just to prevent inflation, but also deflation, and to help promote a stable monetary environment in which full employment can be achieved. A brief history of the U.S. gold standard is enough to show that when such a simple rule is adopted, inflation can be avoided, but strict adherence to that rule can create economic instability, if not political unrest.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

*The gold standard is a monetary system in which a currency's value is pegged to gold.

*Before being a medium of exchange, gold was used for worship.

With its large discoveries of gold, England became the first country to implement the gold standard.

The Bretton Woods agreement established that the U.S. dollar was the dominant reserve currency and that the dollar was convertible to gold at the fixed rate of $35 per ounce.

In 1971, President Nixon stopped the convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold.

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Gold Standard System Versus Fiat System

As its name suggests, the term gold standard refers to a monetary system in which the value of a currency is based on gold. A fiat system, by contrast, is a monetary system in which the value of a currency is not based on any physical commodity but is instead allowed to fluctuate dynamically against other currencies on the foreign-exchange markets. The term "fiat" is derived from the Latin "fieri," meaning an arbitrary act or decree. In keeping with this etymology, the value of fiat currencies is ultimately based on the fact that they are defined as legal tender by way of government decree.

In the decades before the First World War, international trade was conducted based on what has come to be known as the classical gold standard. In this system, trade between nations was settled using physical gold. Nations with trade surpluses accumulated gold as payment for their exports. Conversely, nations with trade deficits saw their gold reserves decline as gold flowed out of those nations as payment for their imports.

The Gold Standard: A History

"We have gold because we cannot trust governments," President Herbert Hoover famously said in 1933 in his statement to Franklin D. Roosevelt. This statement foresaw one of the most draconian events in U.S. financial history: the Emergency Banking Act, which forced all Americans to convert their gold coins, bullion, and certificates into U.S. dollars.3 While the legislation successfully stopped the outflow of gold during the Great Depression, it did not change the conviction of gold bugs, people who are forever confident in gold's stability as a source of wealth.

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