No, there are no restrictions on private ownership of gold in the United States. You're only limited by your budget and your common sense. Gold can now be owned as a non-monetary product, and many investors are taking advantage of this by rolling over their IRA into a Gold IRA. For those interested in learning more about this process, a great resource is a Gold IRA rollover guide or a top rated gold IRA companies blog post.However, any attempt by private citizens to reintroduce gold money as a medium of exchange will be quickly challenged by the government as an illegal competition against its monopoly on paper money. The ownership of gold was not legalized to restore solid money, but because the government no longer considers gold to be important.
Please wait a moment and try again. The restriction on the ownership of gold in the United States was repealed after President Gerald Ford signed a bill legalizing private ownership of gold coins, ingots and certificates through an act of Congress, codified in the Pub. It was a consequence of the inflow of gold caused by the revaluation of gold plus the flight of capital to the United States. That price remained in effect until August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon announced that the United States would stop converting dollars into gold at a fixed value, thus abandoning the gold standard for foreign exchange (see Nixon Shock).
The Treasury initiated its own policy of sterilizing gold to prevent inflation from rising due to the increase in gold inflows into the United States. After the passage of the Gold Reserve Act, several individuals were accused of violating clauses restricting the ownership and trading of gold. I hereby declare that such gold and silver holds are prohibited and that all such gold and silver coins, ingots or other possessions will be tendered within fourteen days to government agents. Since the exchange value of money at that time was greater than the basic value of the gold content in coins, people generally did not resist exchanging their gold for the remaining medium of exchange of paper money.
Once you hold a real gold coin in your hand and feel its weight and density, you realize that gold is simply difficult to imitate. Converting gold to paper money, to complete an exchange, and then converting it back into gold from paper will become commonplace. The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 transferred all U.S. gold into the hands of the Treasury.
These prohibitions were relaxed starting in 1964: private investors again granted gold certificates on April 24, 1964, although the obligation to pay the certificate holder on demand in kind of gold would not be respected. Private ownership of gold certificates was legalized in 1964 and may be the open property of collectors, but they cannot be exchanged for gold. Therefore, one of FDR's first acts as president was to declare a national emergency for Americans to withdraw their gold and currency from the troubled banking system. Owning gold is now very popular among Americans, so it would be a very difficult political task for Congress to once again ban the possession of gold.
