The Gold Standard Act was an Act of the

United States Congress The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washing ...

, signed by President

William McKinley William McKinley (January 29, 1843September 14, 1901) was the 25th president of the United States, serving from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. As a politician he led a realignment that made his Republican Party largely dominant in ...

and effective on March 14, 1900, defining the

United States dollar The United States dollar ( symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the officia ...

gold Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile met ...

weight and requiring the

United States Treasury The Department of the Treasury (USDT) is the national treasury and finance department of the federal government of the United States, where it serves as an executive department. The department oversees the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and t ...

to redeem, on demand and in gold coin only, paper currency the Act specified. The Act formalized the American

gold standard A gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold. The gold standard was the basis for the international monetary system from the 1870s to the early 1920s, and from the la ...

that the

Coinage Act of 1873 The Coinage Act of 1873 or Mint Act of 1873, was a general revision of laws relating to the Mint of the United States. By ending the right of holders of silver bullion to have it coined into standard silver dollars, while allowing holders of go ...

, which demonetized silver, had established by default. Before and after the Act, silver currency including silver certificates and the silver dollar circulated at face value as fiat currency not redeemable for gold. The Act fixed the value of one dollar at 25.8

grain A grain is a small, hard, dry fruit (caryopsis) – with or without an attached hull layer – harvested for human or animal consumption. A grain crop is a grain-producing plant. The two main types of commercial grain crops are cereals and legum ...

s of 90% pure gold, equivalent to about $20.67 per troy ounce, very near its

historic value Historic value (or historical value) is an increase in value because of historical aging. Original materials and signs of craftmanship are important to historic value, while later-date changes can diminish it. Records and documents With regard to ...

. American circulating gold coins of the period comprised an alloy of 90% gold and 10% copper for durability. After the realigning election of 1932 following the onset of the

Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...

, from March 1933 the gold standard was abandoned, and the Act abrogated, by a coordinated series of policy changes including

executive orders ''Executive Orders'' is a techno-thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on July 1, 1996. It picks up immediately where the final events of ''Debt of Honor'' (1994) left off, and features now-U.S. President Jack Ryan as he tries to d ...

by President

Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin Delano Roosevelt (; ; January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As the ...

, new laws, and controversial Supreme Court rulings. After

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

international agreements comprising the

Bretton Woods system The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, Australia, and Japan after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. The Bretto ...

formally restored foreign central banks' ability to exchange United States dollars for gold at a fixed price. World trade growth increasingly stressed this system, which was abandoned in the Nixon shock of 1971. Attempts to reform the Bretton Woods system quickly proved unworkable and failed. All modern currencies thus became fiat currencies freely floating and subject to market forces despite capital controls imposed by some central banks, with gold as a

commodity In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them. The price of a comm ...

References

External links

Gold Standard Act
(text of the Act)
Gold Standard Act of 1900
(discussion) {{Authority control United States federal currency legislation 1900 in American law Gold legislation 1900 in economics Gold in the United States

See also

References

Further reading

External links