Gold in November in History – Mostly in Thanksgiving Week
President Abe Lincoln issued unbacked “Greenbacks” to finance the Civil War but the U.S. government returned to the gold standard before the end of that final year in the war, following Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth. It was on November 13, 1865, when the U.S. Treasury introduced the first U.S. Gold Certificates, paper money fully backed by gold and Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary, Salmon P. Chase was on the obverse of the $10,000 Gold Certificate. These bank notes with gold backing lasted until President Franklin D. Roosevelt limited domestic ownership of gold in 1933. Coincidentally, many of the actions or decisions involving gold by the government came within a few weeks or even days of Thanksgiving, which was actually established by Lincoln on October 3, 1863. He declared the official holiday following his receipt of a touching letter from Sarah Josepha Hale on September 28, 1863, advocating for the designation.
(Photo from the currency collection at the National Museum of American History)
1875: Gold in our teeth was never a big deal, until we reached $4,000 gold, so now a 5-gram crown with 18-karat gold could be worth about $500 in melt value. Gold teeth became routine 150 years ago: On November 16, 1875, Dr. William Bonwill of Philadelphia was honored with the golden Elliott Cresson Medal, the highest award of the Franklin Institute, for his invention of a dental mallet to pound gold into teeth, in 1867 (patented in 1873). His breakthrough for dentists and gold bugs was an electromagnetic hammer for easier and faster use of gold as a restorative material for fillings.
1964: Britain was on the Gold Standard for over two centuries, from 1717 to 1931, the longest span of any nation, and those dates fairly well parallel the rise and peak of the British Empire. After 1931, Britain fell on hard economic times for at least 50 years, until the Thatcher era. The British pound kept eroding in value, in terms of both the U.S. dollar and gold. On November 24, 1964, two days before Thanksgiving, the pound reached the low end of its allowable trading range ($2.78 to $2.82) and was hastily rescued by a $3 billion loan from the U.S. and several European nations but this was only a short-term band-aid.
1967: John Brooks covered this crisis in detail in his closing chapter of, “Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street.” In his Chapter 12, “In Defense of Sterling,” he wrote that Friday, November 17, 1967, was “the wildest day in the history of the exchange markets, and the blackest in the thousand-year history of sterling,” as Britain announced a massive 14.3% devaluation of the pound, from $2.80 to $2.40, effective the next day. New York Federal Reserve chair Alfred Hayes said, at the close of the book, “That day in November, here at the bank, when a courier brought me the top-secret British document informing us of the decision to devalue, I felt physically sick. Sterling would not be the same. It would never again command the same amount of faith around the world.” And he was right.
Sure enough, there was another pound sterling crisis in March 1968, and the pound now trades at $1.30 to the dollar, down from $2.80 in 1967 and $4.86 in 1931 – and that’s in terms of a weak dollar, not gold. In terms of gold, it took just 4.63 pounds to buy a gold ounce when Britain went off the gold standard in 1931. Now, it takes over 3,100 British pounds to buy an ounce of gold – a 680-fold rise in sterling terms.
1983: Continuing the British pound vs. gold drama, on November 26, 1983 (the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving), a group of small-time crooks raided the weakly-guarded safe at Heathrow Airport, hoping to grab up to up to $1 million worth of Spanish peseta, but instead they found and took 96,000 gold Troy ounces, then worth $37 million, the biggest heist ever. That much gold would now be worth nearly $400 million. This heist was recently dramatized in a six-part BBC series on PBS, “The Gold” on Masterpiece.
1985: Forty years ago, on November 14, 1985, the Senate passed the Gold Coin Bullion Act, which established U.S. backing for new legal tender bullion gold coins. The Act was signed by President Ronald Reagan on December 17, 1985, and the first American Gold Eagles were dated 1986. These coins were the first non-commemorative legal tender gold coins issued by the U.S. Mint in over 50 years.
1986: On November 24, 1986 (the Monday before Thanksgiving), the American Silver Eagle dollar coin, like its gold counterpart, sold out on its first day of issue. Another 250,000 coins were placed on order by coin dealers the same day. The U.S. had begun minting new silver and gold bullion coins in 1986. In the industry, these and commemorative coins are referred to as non-circulating legal tender (NCLT) coins. At face value, while a one-ounce American Gold Eagle coin is worth $50 and you could receive that from a bank, the actual value of the coins is exponentially higher, at over $4,000, so a normal, prudent person wouldn’t spend them for face value.
More Reasons for Thanksgiving – Gold and Silver Double Since Thanksgiving of 2023
As Thanksgiving approaches next week, another reason to be thankful is that gold and silver have more than doubled in the two years since Thanksgiving 2023, about a month after we met to discuss the future of gold prices with Forbes publisher and best-selling author Steve Forbes. The conversation was highlighted by where Steve and I thought the outlook for gold would be in 2024. We probably appeared to be wildly optimistic in predicting $2,500 gold but gold reached that level the next August and ended the year over $2,600 per ounce. Then silver began soaring in 2025, and both metals have now doubled:
Gold rose again on Wednesday morning, November 19, as investors continue to vote for gold and silver as safe-haven assets. Gold has mostly been in a holding pattern above $4,000 lately, in anticipation of some government releases that are soon to come forward after the six-week government shutdown. Some of those will include the latest jobs report this week and any signal from the minutes of the October U.S. Federal Reserve policy meeting regarding their final 2025 FOMC meeting in December. Gold has been vacillating based on shifting expectations of another Fed rate cut in December and essentially any new economic release. So far in November, the S&P 500 and Dow are down 3%, the NASDAQ is off 5% and Bitcoin is off 18%. Gold is up 2.3% and silver is up 6% so far this month – another potential cause for Thanksgiving.
