Signature Coins & Bullion

In 1971, the height of the Vietnam War, it is estimated that the US Federal Reserve had printed sixty dollars in paper for every dollar of gold they owned. (As outrageous as this may seem, it is similar to what caused the credit crisis of 2007. Banks have lent far more than sixty pounds of debt for every one pound of deposits.) With foreign central banks returning paper dollars and demanding physical gold, Nixon was forced to act. This quote taken from Wikipedia explains how unusual this was:

“In the first six months of 1971, assets for $22 billion fled the U.S. In response, on August 15, 1971, Nixon unilaterally imposed 90-day wage and price controls, a 10% import surcharge, and most importantly "closed the gold window", making the dollar inconvertible to gold directly, except on the open market. Unusually, this decision was made without consulting members of the international monetary system or even his own State Department, and was soon dubbed the Nixon Shock.”

As questioned by Antal Fekete, is it a coincidence that the paper gold market came into existence at the same time as Nixon abandoned gold? Foreign demands for dollar to gold convertibility were satisfied by the illusion that although they could not convert dollars to physical gold, they could convert dollars into paper gold via the newly formed open market of derivatives on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Overnight the US treasury along with the Federal Reserve created unlimited tonnes of Paper Gold backed by 150,000 tonnes of physical metal. And this paper gold was backed by unlimited amounts of paper dollars, not backed by physical metal.
Today, most experts agree that more than one hundred ounces of paper gold lay claim to every ounce of the physical metal. Add on top of this the recent innovation of gold and silver Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) and the crime of the century begins to become clear.