Money: Gold standard to labour standard

Bank of England gold reserves

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Timeline

  • 1694, July 27, Bank of England founded
  • 1717 Sir Isaac Newton, Master of the Royal Mint, adopts a de facto Gold Standard.
  • 1725 Bank of England issues first partially printed banknotes
  • 1819 UK formally adopts the Gold Standard
  • 1834 USA adopts the Gold Standard de facto
  • 1900 USA adopts the Gold Standard de jure when Congress passed the Gold Standard Act
  • 1914 UK leaves the Gold Standard in preparation for World War I (Currency and Bank Notes Act 1914)
  • 1919, June, USA returns to the Gold Standard
  • 1925, May, Britain returned to the Gold Standard with Australia and South Africa. The British Gold Standard Act 1925 introduced the gold bullion standard
  • 1931 September 19, Britain “temporarily” abandons the gold standard (Gold Standard (Amendment) Act 1931), but has never gone back
  • 1944, July 22, USA, Britain and other allied nations, sign up to the Bretton Woods international monetary agreement
  • 1968 The Bank of England prints their first ‘Giant’ banknote with a face value of £1 million
  • 1971, August 15, the United States terminates convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively ending the Bretton Woods system and rendering the dollar a fiat currency
  • 1976, January 7–8 the Jamaica Accords ratified the end of the Bretton Woods monetary system
  • 1997 As part of the development of Modern Money Theory, Warren Mosler proposes a Labor Standard of money as part of a government Job Guarantee program

Sources

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