Gold Standard

The gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is a fixed weight of Gold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard

international standard adoption

• 1816: UK
• 1873: Germany, US, others

Germany had gone off the gold standard in 1914, and could not effectively return to it because war reparations had cost it much of its gold reserves. A number of other countries (other than the US) left the gold standard during the war. Most of them returned over a period of time after.