Mark Moss traces how the U.S. seized private gold in 1933, revalued it from $20 to $35 per ounce, and wiped out 60% of holders' wealth. After World War II, France and others demanded gold backing the dollar. Nixon ended the gold standard in 1971, launching a 53-year fiat-money experiment.
1933, the government got themselves into trouble and they owed a lot of gold. And so what'd they do? Article 6102, they declared a bank holiday. All the banks shut down for a week. No one could get their money out of the bank. When the banks opened back up, gold's illegal, you're not allowed to own it, and you can't get your gold out of the bank. Don't worry though, we're going to give you your $20 per ounce. Here you go, these debt instruments. We're going to give them to you, but they're not redeemable for gold anymore. And by the way, it's not $20 per ounce anymore, now it's $35 per ounce. So you just lost 60% of your wealth instantly. Oh my God. So we know that we can't trust them because they fail over and over and over. Then now gold is $35 per ounce. So that continued on to the '30s, the '40s, the '50s. By we get to the '50s and the '60s, all these nations around the world are like, wait a minute, what is going on? You're printing way too many dollars. We don't want these paper certificates. We want the gold. So they start collecting the gold from the US. France sends their warships over to the US to collect the gold. And President Richard Nixon in 1971 said, Nope, we default on our obligations. We will not pay out the gold. The gold window is closed and the dollar is no longer pegged to gold. Now, this was a really big deal because in 1944, under what's called the Bretton Woods Agreement, the entire world agreed collectively that the dollar would be pegged to gold and all the currencies would be pegged to the dollar. But the US lied the whole time. They printed too many dollars. And when that severed, not just dollar get disconnected from gold, all currencies did. So we're 52 years or now 53 years into this fiat money experiment that the world has never seen before.
