1914

Gold standard breaks

War finance stops the peacetime rules: convertibility and gold shipment.

Gold sovereign coin minted in India, obverse and reverse side by side.
British gold sovereign (India mint) — emblem of the classical gold-standard coin network.CC0 — open museum plate via Wikimedia Commons.

The classical gold standard was a set of practices, not a single treaty: convertibility, gold points, and London settlement. In 1914 war finance suspended that peacetime order.

What followed was not the same system on pause. The longer page is that break.

Classical gold standard’s wartime end