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The gold standard

How gold became money, how the link to currency was broken, and what survived the break.

For most of recorded commerce, a unit of currency was a claim on a weight of metal. The gold standard formalised that claim: a state fixed the price of gold in its own money, promised convertibility, and accepted the monetary discipline that followed. It collapsed twice in the twentieth century — in the 1930s and again at Bretton Woods in 1971 — and neither collapse was caused by gold running out.

This hub gathers our reporting on the monetary history of the metal: the classical standard and its balance-of-payments mechanics, the interwar gold-exchange standard, Bretton Woods, and the residual role gold plays on central-bank balance sheets today.

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An excavated hoard of gold coins and torcs laid out on grey museum foam with numbered labels and conservator's tweezers

History · 16 min read

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

A field of gold torcs and coins is a spectacular find and a treacherous document. The people who buried it were not writing to us, and the reasons they had for putting it in the ground are exactly what the ground does not record.

Marguerite Adler · 9 August 2026

More on the gold standard

Terms used in this topic

Troy ounce
The unit gold is priced and traded in, equal to 31.1034768 grams — about 10 percent heavier than the avoirdupois ounce used for groceries. A quoted gold price of $2,400 an ounce always means a troy ounce. The unit descends from the medieval fairs at Troyes in Champagne and survived into modern bullion markets because contracts, refinery bars and assay certificates were all written in it.
LBMA Gold Price
The twice-daily benchmark, set at 10:30 and 15:00 London time through an electronic auction operated by ICE Benchmark Administration. Participants submit buy and sell volumes at a proposed price; the price moves until the imbalance falls within tolerance and the auction settles. Because it produces a single printable number for a fixed moment, it is what miners, refiners, ETFs and central banks write into contracts.
Central bank reserve gold
Gold held by a monetary authority as a foreign reserve asset. It carries no counterparty and no currency of issue, which is why it is bought most heavily by central banks seeking to reduce exposure to any single sovereign. Holdings are reported monthly to the IMF, usually valued at market price, and are often stored abroad — a large share of the world's reserve gold sits in New York, London and Basel rather than at home.

Questions readers ask

What was the gold standard?
A monetary system in which a currency's value was fixed to a defined weight of gold and, in its classical form, freely convertible into that weight on demand. Money supply was therefore constrained by gold reserves rather than by policy choice.
Why did the gold standard end?
Because convertibility became incompatible with domestic policy goals. Governments that needed to fund deficits, defend employment or run independent monetary policy could not simultaneously guarantee redemption at a fixed price. The final break came in 1971, when the United States suspended dollar convertibility.
Could a country return to a gold standard?
Mechanically yes, at some price; practically it would require surrendering discretionary monetary policy and accepting price adjustment through wages and output instead of the exchange rate. No major economy has proposed it seriously in decades.

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Reported from the History desk.