Gold has been used throughout history as a form of payment and has been a relative standard for currency equivalents specific to economic regions or countries. After World War II a gold standard was established following the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, fixing the gold price at US$35 per troy ounce, or, in effect, pricing the U.S. dollar as 1/35th of a troy ounce of gold.

The system existed until the 1971 Nixon Shock, when the US stopped the direct convertibility of the United States dollar to gold. Since 1968 the usual benchmark for the price of gold is known as the London Gold Fixing, a twice-daily (telephone( meeting of representatives from five bullion-trading firms. Furthermore, there is active gold trading based on the intra-day spot price, derived from gold-trading markets around the world as they open and close throughout the day. The following table sets forth the gold price versus various assets and key statistics: