March 20th

Factual Questions
1

On this date in 1968, my father worked as a laborer in a factory. Mom didn’t work. They had a couple kids, a mortgage, and bought a new car every other year. They were doing just fine.All the bills were paid, money in savings, and we took 2 vacations every year: two weeks in summer, two weeks in winter. We always traveled.
On this date in 1978, my mother had gotten a job to help make ends meet. My father was forced to go to night school and get a college degree because factory pay didn’t cut it any more. The last new car dad ever bought was in 1974. No more double vacations. “vacation” now meant a day at the county fair in July. Both parents working full time, (my pop at a much higher paying job than before), yet our standard of living dropped like a rock. What a difference 10 years make.

Did I mention: On this day in 1968 the United states went off the GOLD STANDARD?

Since then, has anyone put forth a significant effort to return this country to the Gold Standard? What are the pros and cons when comparing gold backed money to the worthless “it’s worth a buck 'cause Alan Greenspan says it is” pieces of paper we have now?

No bias on my part:rolleyes:

2

Well, the U.S. went off the gold standard in April 1933.

3

Acording to http://www.rotten.com we went off the Gold standard on March 20th, 1968. So if we went off in 1933 I assume sometime between 33 and 68 we had gone back on.

4

“You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold” - Williams Jennings Bryand, 1896.

5

The British went off the gold standard in 1931 and the U.S. in 1931 and everybody bailed on it by 1937.

6

I found another site that says Nixon took us off in 1971. Why so many different dates?

7

Hey pkbites:

Let’s go to the gold standard. But only on leap years!

8

There was a thread in GD about this recently. I suggest you have a lookee there.

Basically, gold has no inherent value, so pinning your values on that is as meaningless as pinning it on anything else. Monetary policy is far better understood these days than in the 1930s, so there is really no reason to adopt such an arbitrary system.

Monetary value is based on perception. To this end basing it on nothing is just as valid as basing it on the price of gold.

pan

9

What happened in March of 1968 is that Congress ended the requirement that 25% of U.S. currency be backed by gold.

In August 1971, President Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar into any gold.

FDR took the U.S. off the gold standard on April 19, 1933 “for the time being”. The U.S. sort of went back to it after the war, but never in the same way prior to the FDR’s action in the Great Depression. If I understood economics better, I could explain it better.