The history of precious metals and their role in global finance.

Gold and silver have worked as money for better than five thousand years. Egyptians were smelting gold around 3600 BCE. By 1500 BCE the weight of gold set the standard for cross-border trade, though the metal was still weighed out rather than struck into coins. The first coins came from Lydia, in Asia Minor, around 600 BCE. A generation later, King Croesus refined the line into the first bimetallic coinage — a system of gold and silver struck to a known weight and purity. Rome took the idea further with the Aureus, and then Rome also showed the first hard lesson. As the empire watered down the silver in its Denarius to pay for wars, the prices in the market rose and the trust in the coin fell. The coin was debased. The empire followed.

In 1284 the city of Venice struck the gold Ducat to a strict weight and a set purity. It was the benchmark coin of the Middle Ages for better than five hundred years, trusted from London to the Levant. In 1300, London set down the hallmarking system to certify purity in gold and silver — a framework the English market still leans on today. After 1492, silver and gold from the mines of the Americas flooded Europe, and the great powers of the age learned that a stockpile of metal was the backbone of state power. The modern central bank hoard of gold grew out of that old lesson.

The metal is the only money that has outlasted every state that tried to replace it.

The classical gold standard came next. A nation’s currency stood for a fixed weight of gold in the vault. Britain took the rule up in 1821, Germany in 1871, the United States in 1879. Paper money was, at its root, a claim on gold held in the vault. From the 1870s to the First World War, the system produced stable exchange rates and a run of steady world trade. It's often called the golden age of commerce for good reason. Governments could not print past the gold they held. The rule held them honest. When the war came, most nations broke the rule, and the runaway price rises of the 1920s — the Weimar nightmare at their worst — were the plain outcome of that break.

In 1944, forty-four nations gathered at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire and pegged the U.S. dollar to gold at thirty-five dollars the ounce. Other currencies were pegged to the dollar. The dollar became the anchor of the world, backed by the gold held in Fort Knox. By the sixties, heavy spending on the Vietnam War and on the Great Society drove prices up and drew foreign dollars back to the U.S. vault in search of gold. The gold was draining out. On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon shut the window. The dollar was no longer redeemable in gold. The modern age of floating currencies had begun, and with it the slow loss of the dollar’s buying power at the store.

Since that August day, the U.S. dollar has lost better than eighty-five percent of its buying power. A gold ounce over the same stretch has kept pace with — and more than kept pace with — the rise in prices. In 2024 gold climbed about twenty-five percent and set forty new all-time highs. In 2025 it broke three thousand dollars the ounce in March and kept climbing past four thousand by the autumn. Gold now trades above $5,163 the troy ounce. Three forces drove the run. The first was the heavy, steady buying by central banks — Poland, China, India, and others — which took in over a thousand metric tons a year from 2022 through 2024, and six hundred and thirty-four tonnes in the first nine months of 2025. The second was stubborn price pressure and the swelling weight of state debts, which drove households and funds toward a thing they could hold. The third was the plain return of world tensions, which brought readers of the market back to the oldest shelter there is.

The household reader who sets all of this down in order will see the same pattern the old records show. When trust in the paper falters, the metal returns to its place. The dollar in the wallet is a young thing. The gold in the vault is an old thing. The older one is the one that has stood.