Gold standard
monetary system based on the value of gold
A gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is defined by 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 late 1920s to 1932 as well as from 1944 until 1971, when the United States unilaterally terminated convertibility of the US dollar into gold, effectively ending the Bretton Woods system. Many states nonetheless hold substantial gold reserves.
Historically, the silver standard and bimetallism have been more common than the gold standard. The shift to an international monetary system based on a gold standard reflected accident, network externalities, and path dependence. Great Britain accidentally adopted a de facto gold standard in 1717 when Isaac Newton, master of the Royal Mint, set the exchange rate of silver to gold too low, thus causing silver coins to go out of circulation. As Great Britain became the world's leading financial and commercial power in the 19th century, other states increasingly adopted Britain's monetary system.
The gold standard was largely abandoned during the Great Depression before being reinstated in a limited form as part of the post-World War II Bretton Woods system. The gold standard was abandoned due to its propensity for volatility, as well as the constraints it imposed on governments: by retaining a fixed exchange rate, governments were hamstrung in engaging in expansionary policies to, for example, reduce unemployment during economic recessions.
According to a 2012 survey of 39 economists, most (92 percent) agreed that a return to the gold standard would not improve price-stability and employment outcomes, and two-thirds of economic historians surveyed in the mid-1990s rejected the idea that the gold standard "was effective in stabilizing prices and moderating business-cycle fluctuations during the nineteenth century." Some economists suggest that the gold standard was a factor in prolonging and deepening the Great Depression.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q173509. The Library of Congress control number is sh85055741. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1932, 1944, 1971 and 1717.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gold standard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.