1918

The old machine does not return

Fighting ends. What does not return is the pre-1914 gold standard: several centres, private convertibility, and gold that moved when the points were hit.

Twenty-dollar Federal Reserve note, series of 1914. Wartime paper, not a photograph of 1918.Public domain.

The fighting ends in 1918. The classical gold standard does not resume with it. That standard had been several centres, private convertibility, and gold that moved when the gold points were hit.

What comes later is a different architecture: Genoa’s gold-exchange sketch in 1922, and Britain’s return to a pre-war parity in 1925. This year is the end of the war, not those later pegs.

Classical gold standard’s wartime end →