Doing various web searches, I see some sources that are darn sure it was FDR, and others saying it was Nixon during 1971.
Even one of Cecil’s columns comment that it in 1933 we were “preparing” to go off the gold standard.
What’s the real story?
The U. S. *last *went off the gold standard in 1971.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had also taken U. S. currency off of the gold standard during the Depression, but it was later restored.
This had come as a real blow to some wealthy investors who had been looking forward to a bonanza in foreclosed properties but now anticipated that fewer mortgagors were going to default and lose their houses, businesses, etc., to them. General Smedley Butler, the Commandant of the U. S. Marine Corps and others testified before Congress that some members of the DuPont family and other extremely wealthy individuals had been sufficiently annoyed to begin planning a kind of silent coup whereby democracy would be suspended and replaced by a dictatorship run on what they saw as sound business practices.
It was a process: FDR eliminated direct convertibility of dollars to gold, and private ownership of gold for currency purposes. Nixon abolished all linkage between gold and the dollar, allowing the dollar to float against all other currencies and Americans to own gold as an investment again
FDR took us off the gold standard for internal domestic use, and he also outlawed the private ownership of any gold coins or bullion - citizens were required by law to turn in what ever gold they had in their possession(lots of people did not turn it in, and lots of people sent their gold to other countries to hide it or cash it in).
Nixon took us off the gold standard in our foreign trade.
The reasons for both actions were the same, we were spending more than we were making, and printing more money than what we were worth, making paper money worth less.
Reagan restored United States gold coinage, and allowed americans to once again own gold - best thing Reagan ever did.
The prohibition against Americans owning gold was repealed on January 1, 1975, during the Ford administration.
The difference between the pre-1933 and pre-1971 gold standards lay in who was allowed to exchange dollars for gold. Before 1933, anyone could do so. If the dollar depreciated relative to gold, you could bring your dollars to the nearest Federal Reserve Bank (after 1913) and get a specified weight of gold in exchange. In 1933, this right of exchange was repealed, and American citizens were forbidden to own gold.
After World War II, the right of exchange was restored, but only for foreign central banks, which accumulate dollars for foreign trade purposes. This “right of exchange” was less effective at preventing inflation. Foreign central banks were often reluctant, for political reasons, to demand gold in return for dollars, because doing so tended to antagonize the American administration. During the moderate inflation of the late 1960’s, however, foreign central banks did demand exchange in sufficient quantities so as to force the United States to abandon the system in 1971. The unconstrained “Great Inflation” of the 1970’s followed.