A short history of sound money

In the autumn of 1923, a German mark could buy less by the hour than it had bought that morning. Half a century later, on 15 August 1971, the United States closed the last official promise that foreign governments could still turn dollars into gold at a fixed price. Those two dates are not the beginning of money. They are late chapters in a much older argument: what a unit is, who may create it, and what happens when the stop fails.

Coins get clipped. Banks write receipts that begin as claims on metal and end as notes people are told to trust. Legislatures rename mint ratios, suspend convertibility, or recall gold from private hands. Crowds form at doors that cannot pay.

From metal in the hand to paper that floats

The story does not start with a modern central bank. Traders settled in gold and silver by weight; a stamp cut the cost of checking that metal; a warehouse ticket began to pay a debt while the bullion stayed in the vault. Paper is late. Fiat — money that exists by law and habit rather than by redeemability into a known weight — is later still.

Lydia, Greece, and Rome turned the stamp into a fiscal tool long before any national bank. Centuries later the receipt becomes a note: Amsterdam’s public bank, the Bank of England’s war charter, John Law’s **1720** System, and the French assignats. Each broke under its own laws, in its own century.

One republic, one white metal, one crowded century

Inside the United States the fight was often a statute fight: what the dollar is. From the 1792 coinage law through Jackson’s bank war, Civil War greenbacks, the silver question after 1873, and a gold definition in 1900, Congress kept rewriting the unit — then handed off before the Fed. Silver has its own gravity. A mountain at Potosí poured the metal into Atlantic and Pacific trade; a global coin, mint-ratio fights, and the 1980 squeeze followed. None of that is a footnote to gold.

The crowded modern century opens with a private rescue after 1907, a new central bank, and classical gold’s wartime end. Weimar **1923** shows what happens when the printing press outruns the stop. The 1933 US gold recall, Bretton Woods, and the **1971** gold-window close close the official promise — similar mechanisms in different years, under different laws.