> Essentially, the public were not properly compensated for turning in their gold. I known pretty much nothing about economics or the history here, but I don't

> Essentially, the public were not properly compensated for turning in their gold. I known pretty much nothing about economics or the history here, but I don't see how this follows. The value of the dollar (in terms of what it would buy aside from gold) didn't suddenly shift. Are you saying that the shift in the worth of gold would have happened even if the government hadn't moved off the gold standard? If so, how is it that the government "set" it? And if not, then how did folk lose anything?