Can I really trade my dollars in for gold bullion?

Public Comments

1. It has been many years since that could be done. Not any more. You can always buy gold coins.
2. yeah, if you have 600 or so dollars
3. Um, not from the government. The US went off the "gold standard" (where every dollar of currency was backed by gold stored by the government) a very long time ago. They don't do that anymore -- now the dollar represents a portion of the perceived value of the US economy, which value is set by international currency traders. It's not set in reference to the price of gold any longer. Same goes for Great Britain, whose "pound sterling" ceased to be represented by the value of a pound of sterling silver a very long time ago. You can still take your dollars to a commodity broker and buy gold worth the same value as your dollars -- but this is a risky investment, as both the price of gold and the value of the dollar vary according to speculation on trading markets. If the gold gains value and the dollar loses value, your investment in gold will be worth more. If the dollar gains value and gold loses value, your investment will be worth less. Your gamble :)
4. One of the long-standing myths about modern currency is that it is backed by the U.S. gold supply in Fort Knox. That is, you can trade your greenback dollars to the U.S. government for the equivalent amount of gold bullion at any time. At one point, this was true of most paper currencies in the world. However, the U.S. took away the government backing of the dollar with an actual gold supply (known as leaving the gold standard) in 1971, and every major international currency has followed suit. The obvious question is, "Without gold, what does guarantee the value of our money?" The answer is: nothing at all. The only reason a dollar, or a franc, or a Euro has any value is because we have a stable system in which people are known to accept these pieces of paper in return for something valuable. Or, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman puts it, "the pieces of green paper have value because everybody thinks they have value."