Mark Moss explains how gold split into two prices after 1971: an official $35/oz on paper and a free-market price around $42.60/oz that eventually hit $850 by 1980. When people demand physical delivery instead of paper claims, the price breaks, even if only a minority pushes for it.
They reopened, but with two prices, two prices. So we still have the official tier. This is the one that governments give you, $35 per ounce. It's frozen. But the free market tier, the price for everybody else is different. The free tier, the free price tier is $42.60, which is 22% above the official price. The quote unquote official price was still printed. It just stopped being real. That's not what people could buy and sell it for. Now, once the paper price was decoupled from the real settlement layer, the market had to find the new number. This is where we found price stability or price efficiency. And we saw this in 1971. So of course, here in 1971, President Richard Nixon severed the ties, ended the gold currency as we know it, and the price started moving higher. The real, the real price of gold started to skyrocket pretty quickly. By January 1980, it was $850 an ounce. From $35 to $850, that's a 24 times repricing in just a dozen years. Now, every year of it, the official line was that everything was under control, of course. Now look, everyone takes the wrong lesson from that chart. The lesson is that when enough people demand the physical instead of the promises, the paper price, it won't bend, it breaks, right? It snaps. And you don't need a majority here. 1968 proved that just a motivated minority, just taking delivery is enough, OK? That's the key piece. Taking delivery is enough.
