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Comment by direwolf20 | Hacker News Reader

Why do they think the US will give it to them? After all, last time this happened, the US didn't actually have the gold, it cancelled all gold IOUs — effectively stealing the gold — and that was the Nixon shock. It made the US very wealthy for the next half century.

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Aren't you confusing two things? When Nixon suspended Bretton Woods, he wasn't refusing to repatriate gold, he was reneging on the promise that dollars could be converted into gold (one of the reasons being that it no longer had enough physical gold to redeem).

So countries like France held dollars and could no longer get them converted to gold. From my reading, before 1971, all the requests to convert dollars by France, Switzerland, and the UK were all honoured, contributing to the crisis. I don't believe anyone were refused conversion until 1971. And even then, everyone still had their dollars. All they lost was the ability to redeem for gold according to the fixed Bretton Woods price. Dollars could still be used to buy gold at market value.

But this article is talking about repatriating gold owned by other governments but physically held in vaults by the US. A bunch of countries (including Germany) have already repatriated vast amount that were housed by the US, and those requests have never been refused. The Federal Reserve is said to even keeps the bars owned by other countries physically separate, rather than commingled.

That's a refusal to repatriate, since other countries had sent their gold to the US to exchange for dollars with the understanding they could exchange it back at an time.

Is that happened? I'm not an expert on the history of Bretton Woods, but my understanding is countries that sent gold to be stored in the US retained ownership over it, and repatriation was never refused.

If they had converted gold to dollars, this only suspended their ability to "rebalance" between gold and dollars, and no value was lost.

The dollars were worth a small fraction of the gold. It's true that no value was lost — because that value was transferred from the other countries to the US.

That doesn't sound right. Money is fungible. Anyone who missed the "window" to convert in 1971 (which major countries like UK, Germany, and France didn't, as far as I can see) still had their dollars. The US-domiciled gold that backed the dollars had always belong the US; so the dollars being an "IOU" makes sense in a colloquial sense, I guess, but it's a gross simplification that misses the broader point about how Bretton Woods affected monetary policy. It shifted the US into being able to maintain a permanent trade deficit, and the US was free to devalue the dollar (effectively the world's default currency) without repercussion, which is good for the US but not for everyone else.

The dollars were worth much less than the gold. As soon as you couldn't exchange dollars for gold any more, the value of a dollar fell by a factor of several to reflect that.

That would be more or less equivalent to defaulting on government bonds, in the sense that the latter are only backed by the buyers trust that the US will pay them back.

The result would be catastrophic for the US: worst case would be a domino cash in of American debt.

Many Trump supporters actually believe a collapse of the dollar would be a good thing, and that Trump has a plan, because of (some vague bogeyman about the federal reserve). They don’t realize or want to admit that this would mean they would become poorer overnight.

Well there is that "project 2025" that we were told wasn't real.

There's an amusing anecdote about the Dutch queen who asked the prime minister if he read Mein Kampf.

Everyone is just desperately pretending none of this is happening.

It already happened — see Nixon shock — and was enormously beneficial for the US economy.

This is not the same thing at all, you're confusing fixed exchange rate with just giving back something you don't own.

> why do they think the US will give it to them?

Because gold repatriation isn't something that special or unthinkable. It happened multiple times already.

Netherlands, Austria, Belgium and Germany have asked a significant portion of their gold back. The US gave them and the world kept working as before. The amount of doom posting in this thread is mildly amusing though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_repatriation#Germany

> Why do they think the US will give it to them?

Perhaps they think asking is the best way to find out.

The biggest customer of Canadian Mint gold bullion are US investors in New York, as Wall Street knows its refinement is always very pure and traceable. Note this mint saw an $8.3B uptick in sales in 2025 alone due to international political antics.

"The prohibition on gold ownership in the US was relaxed in 1964, and finally rescinded in 1977 when Gerald Ford signed proclamation Pub.L. 93-373."

However, during severe economic recession the US government has Nationalized private gold holdings >1oz in the past. Something like a 35% drop in markets due to a theoretical Magnificent 7 "AI" bubble correction does pose a nonzero risk.

Keep some Popcorn ready, as the price of Gold going any higher is getting weird. =3

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

That debt clock looks like a monopoly board. Lets be honest, the world economy has become one massive game of monopoly with big tech and big oil being the banks.

What would the founding fathers, the ghosts of the French Revolution or Plato say to that? Nothing, they’re all dead.

We should be doing the changing, not the long dead past.

> What would the founding fathers, the ghosts of the French Revolution or Plato say to that? Nothing, they’re all dead.

Well, the people are dead. Calling a ghost itself "alive" or "dead" is a categorical error.

There are different kinds of Death, and Socrates story of resolve still greatly affects peoples ideas of free speech and due process within a just rule of law.

Have a great day. =3

"The Evolution of Cooperation" (Robert Axelrod)

https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axel...

When did that happen? Are you talking about Breton Woods? Because if that’s the case, you got it completely wrong.

Think they'll have to - you can only switch to a "trust me bro" system once.

Do you think Germany would invade the US if they did it a second time? Or, what exactly would happen as a consequence to the US?

>what exactly would happen as a consequence to the US?

It would trigger a loss of faith in the US and USD. Which could get really spicy given that the US relies on reserve currency status to keep things steady despite comparatively high debt/gdp

Hard to tell what would happen but I suspect its borderline enough that nobody sane wants to find out

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege

Can you provide some references to them doing this the first time? You seem to like posting comments about the "Nixon shock" without providing anything to back it up.

Sorry — I thought this was well known. Until 1971 a united states dollar was an IOU for a certain amount of gold. The US cheated by printing more IOUs than the amount of gold it had. When foreign countries started withdrawing gold at a rate the US thought it would run out, in 1971, it cancelled all IOUs and kept the remaining gold for itself.

https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/gold-convertibi...

So you're referring to the end of the Bretton Woods System, which is its formal name.

> The US cheated by printing more IOUs than the amount of gold it had.

From the article you posted, it looks like the US was dealing with an issue whereby their reduction in global output meant that a reducing demand for dollars could cause a run on gold. I don't know if I would characterise this as "cheating" per se. The article states that there were many efforts, jointly between the US and other countries, to maintain the system, but these ultimately failed.

So I don't really get how this backs your claim that the US cheated? Sure it was controversial, and I'm sure there were many peoole who were unhappy about it, but it looks like they had little choice, given the system was failing and they were dealing with an extraordinary inflation crisis to boot.

If you've only printed enough dollars for the amount of gold you have, a run is no problem because you can exchange as much gold as people want. Gold and dollars can be allowed to be freely exchanged, no matter what. If you've cheated by printing more dollars than you have gold, then you have a problem.

this. Especially USA may use all those gold to build a Gold White House.

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