Executive Order 6102: When the US Confiscated Citizens' Gold

On 5 April 1933, in his second month in office, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102. It required US citizens to deliver almost all their gold coin, bullion, and certificates to the Federal Reserve in exchange for paper dollars at $20.67 per ounce. Less than a year later, Congress revalued gold to $35 per ounce. Citizens who had complied lost roughly 40% of their purchasing power overnight.

The legal framework

EO 6102 was issued under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, with banking-emergency authority granted by the Emergency Banking Act of 9 March 1933. Penalties for non-compliance: a fine up to $10,000 (over $230,000 today) or up to ten years' imprisonment. Exemptions covered jewellery, dental gold, and "rare and unusual coins" the last clause being deliberately vague.

• Order date: 5 April 1933
• Surrender deadline: 1 May 1933
• Exchange rate: $20.67/oz (the historic mint price)
• 1934 Gold Reserve Act revaluation: $35/oz
• Estimated public surrender: ~22 million ounces (~700 tonnes)

Why Roosevelt did it

The US was in the depths of the Great Depression. The gold standard was constraining the Fed's ability to expand the money supply. By concentrating gold holdings at the Treasury and then revaluing the dollar against gold, FDR effectively devalued the dollar by 41% and freed the Fed to inflate. Reflation was the explicit goal, and to a significant degree it worked: monetary expansion contributed to the 1933-37 recovery.

"Government is the only entity that can take your gold and give you paper, and call it justice." paraphrased commentary from gold-standard advocates of the 1930s

Compliance and resistance

Most Americans complied. A meaningful minority did not: gold simply disappeared into safety deposit boxes overseas, into family vaults, and across the border to Canada. Prosecutions for non-compliance were extremely rare in practice. Courts upheld the seizure in the 1935 Gold Clause Cases.

The legacy

EO 6102 remained on the books until 1974, when President Ford signed legislation re-legalising private gold ownership for US citizens. For four decades, it was illegal for an American to own a Krugerrand. The episode remains a foundational reference for arguments in favour of decentralised, hard-to-confiscate stores of value not coincidentally, also a touchstone for modern Bitcoin advocates.

Bottom line: sovereign confiscation of private precious-metal holdings is not a hypothetical. It happened in living memory in the United States. That fact informs how serious investors think about custody.