The United States left the gold standard in 1971.

What the record says

On 15 August 1971, President Richard Nixon directed the Treasury Secretary to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets. Executive Order 6102 had already required people and businesses in the continental United States to deliver specified gold coin, bullion, and gold certificates by 1 May 1933, subject to explicit exceptions. The United States' departure from gold therefore occurred in stages, and saying it simply left the gold standard in 1971 collapses legally and economically distinct measures.

Why it matters

The one-date slogan can make monetary exit rights look like a dispute only among governments and banks. The 1933 order reached people's property directly, but not without exceptions; precision shows who was constrained, when, and how.

• “Nixon ended the gold standard.”

  This compresses the 1971 convertibility suspension and the 1933 domestic gold-delivery order into one event, and it can erase the 1933 order's explicit exceptions.

1. Qualifies · Published 15 Aug 1971

   Address to the Nation Outlining a New Economic Policy: The Challenge of Peace ↗

   15 August 1971 address; directive to the Treasury Secretary on gold convertibility

2. Qualifies · Published 5 Apr 1933

   Executive Order 6102: Forbidding the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold Certificates ↗

   Sections 2-4; delivery requirement, deadline, compensation, and exceptions

• institutional

  The administration presented the 1971 measure as a temporary defense of the dollar and monetary stability, not as a declaration that every United States gold arrangement began or ended on that date.

  Address to the Nation Outlining a New Economic Policy: The Challenge of Peace ↗

1. Oversimplified

   Current verdict.

2. Oversimplified26 Aug 2026

   Evidence revised · verdict unchanged (Oversimplified). The first public worked example was not ledger-derived and linked Executive Order 6102 to 1 FR 1, an unrelated 1936 Federal Register page. This reviewed row replaces that citation with the order text, removes the unsupported 1974 restoration assertion, preserves the order's explicit exceptions, and replaces the seeded identifier with the deterministic ledger id.

3. Oversimplified

   First verdict on file.

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