15 August 1971: Nixon closes the gold window
In a Sunday evening address, President Nixon suspended the dollar's convertibility into gold, along with wage and price controls and an import surcharge. The Bretton Woods system, which had tied the world's currencies to the dollar and the dollar to gold at $35 an ounce, effectively ended. Gold became free to float. By early 1980 it traded at more than twenty times that old official price. Money became a matter of trust.
The lesson: When currencies lose their anchor, real assets can reprice dramatically over the following decade.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Gold (oz) at the start of 1990 → $10,500 today, vs $19,429 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 1990, the first year in our price data after the event. That is 10.5 times the money, but $8,929 less than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Gold (oz) teaches: Gold pays no income, so its returns arrive in rare bursts separated by long droughts; it took almost three decades to regain its 1980 nominal high.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $400 | $10,500 | $19,429 |
| 1995 | $385 | $10,909 | $14,783 |
| 2000 | $290 | $14,483 | $4,626 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Gold (oz)? Every starting year and the full story →
More Gold (oz) history
- 21 January 1980: Gold spikes to $850 an ounce
- 17 March 1968: The gold pool collapses
- 5 April 1933: FDR orders Americans to hand in their gold
- 20 June 2013: Gold sinks below $1,300 after the Fed's taper talk
- 22 July 1944: Bretton Woods rebuilds the money system
- 24 September 1869: Black Friday: the great gold corner collapses
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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