The Real Reason We Left the Gold Standard

Опубликовано: 10 Июнь 2026
на канале: Maxinomics
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Two miners in Australia found 172 pounds of solid gold sitting two inches under the dirt. Their first move was to bury it again. Because in 1869, the hard part was never finding gold. The hard part was surviving long enough to spend it.

That story kicks off a much bigger one about why a useless yellow rock became the closest thing humanity ever agreed on as a universal store of value, why we eventually had to abandon it, and why for billions of people it never stopped mattering in the first place.
This video covers a lot of ground:

The Welcome Stranger - the largest gold nugget ever found, and what happened to the men who found it
The Brinks-Mat Robbery - 3 tons of gold gone in 27 minutes, and the decade of chaos that followed - 03:03
The Gold Standard - why anchoring an entire economy to a finite metal was always a ticking clock - 04:57
Witwatersrand - why we're now digging 2.5 miles straight down just to find a few flakes - 08:25
Russia, China, India - why gold is quietly staging a comeback as a tool of financial independence -- 10:46

Nixon officially killed the gold standard in 1971. But that's only true if you live somewhere with a stable currency and a government that plays by the rules. A lot of the world doesn't. For those people, gold never left.

#Gold #Economics #History #Finance #GoldStandard #Investing #Geopolitics #BrinksMat #Documentary #Money #Discovery

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Chapters:
01:00 The Gold Standard
03:03 The Heist
04:57 How the Gold Standard Really Worked
08:25 The Most Important Gold Mine
09:29 Running Out of Gold
10:46 The Real Reason China Is Hoarding Gold


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Video Editor: Christie Muldoon
Motion Graphics: Seth Laupus
Director of Production Services: Sam Wolf
Thumbnail: Tom Grillo
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Chief Content Officer: Devin Emery

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