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The Gold Standard Act was an Act of the United States Congress, signed by President William McKinley and effective on March 14, 1900, defining the United States dollar by gold weight and requiring the United States Treasury to redeem, on demand and in gold coin only, paper currency the Act specified.
A Series 1934 $10,000 gold certificate depicting Salmon P. Chase, Smithsonian Institution. Gold certificates were issued by the United States Treasury as a form of representative money from 1865 to 1933. While the United States observed a gold standard, the certificates offered a more convenient way to pay in gold than the use of coins
Executive Order 6102 required all persons to deliver on or before May 1, 1933, all but a small amount of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates owned by them to the Federal Reserve in exchange for $20.67 (equivalent to $502 in 2024) [6] per troy ounce.
The only exception to this rule is the $10,000 gold certificate of Series 1900, a number of which were inadvertently released to the public because of a fire in 1935. This set is not considered to be "in circulation" and, in fact, is stolen property. However, the government canceled these banknotes and removed them from official records.
In 1900 the gold dollar was declared the standard unit of account and a gold reserve for government issued paper notes was established. Greenbacks, silver certificates, and silver dollars continued to be legal tender, all redeemable in gold. [39]
Executive Order 6102 prohibited the hoarding of gold certificates, accompanied also by bullion and coins. [4] Unlike the other denominations of US dollars, the $100,000 bill was never issued as a Federal Reserve Note (aka greenback). It was only issued in the form of a gold certificate. About 42,000 of the $100,000 bills were printed.
The Treasury began its own gold sterilization policy in order to stop inflation from potentially increasing due to an increase in inflow of gold into the U.S. soon after the Fed enacted the same policy. Gold holdings more than doubled in the period of 1935 to 1940. [3] This lasted for 16 months from 1936 to 1938.
The preferred forms of paper money were gold certificates and National Gold Bank Notes, the latter having been created specifically to address the desire for hard money in California. During the 1870s and 1880s, the Greenback Party existed for the primary purpose of advocating an increased circulation of United States Notes as a way of creating ...