Lost your gold in a boating accident? Get the certificate

It means “none of your business,” said with a straight face. Ask a stacker at Thanksgiving how much silver they own, somewhere between the turkey and the pie, and the table goes quiet. You’ll hear about the lake. The weather was perfect. The tube of Silver Eagles slid over the side in slow motion, and the dog, who was there, has never been the same. Everyone at the table knows there was no boat. Two of your cousins lost their gold in the same lake, on the same perfect day. That’s the joke.

Nobody knows who told it first. The earliest written version we could find is a 2013 post on a Bitcoin forum, answering a poll about how much people held, and by the next year it was everywhere in that crowd. Gold and silver owners have told it for at least as long, and they had a better reason than most.

On April 5, 1933, a month after a banking panic had shut every bank in the country, Executive Order 6102 required Americans to deliver their gold coins, gold bullion and gold certificates to the Federal Reserve “on or before May 1, 1933.” The price paid was the official one, $20.67 an ounce.

There were exceptions: up to $100 of gold coins per person, coins with “recognized special value to collectors of rare and unusual coins,” and gold used in industry, a profession or art, which is how dentists and jewelers kept working. The penalty for keeping the rest was a fine of up to $10,000, up to ten years in prison, or both.

Then came the part stackers still bring up at barbecues. On January 30, 1934, the Gold Reserve Act was signed, and the next day the dollar was revalued so that gold was worth $35 an ounce. Anyone who had handed in gold at $20.67 had sold it 41% below the new price, and the government now held it at a 69% markup. Imagine the grocery store requiring, by law, that everyone bring back their groceries for a refund, then putting the very same cans back on the shelf a few months later with a price sticker 69% higher and a sign that says “Thank you for shopping with us.”

Prosecutions were few, but they happened. A New York lawyer named Frederick Barber Campbell, who had more than 5,000 ounces at Chase National Bank, was indicted in September 1933. The prosecution failed, and the government kept the gold anyway. In 1935 the Supreme Court’s Gold Clause Cases upheld the government’s position, four justices dissenting.

Private gold ownership became legal again on December 31, 1974, under Public Law 93-373, which lets Americans “purchase, hold, sell, or otherwise deal with gold.” So for 41 years an American could not legally keep a gold bar. That’s the history behind the boat, and 41 years is long enough for a great many grandfathers to take up fishing.

Nobody can promise either way, and anyone who tells you the date is selling something. Here is what’s true. Owning gold has been legal in the US since 1974. The 1933 order rested on emergency banking powers from that era, and the Supreme Court upheld the government’s gold measures in 1935. In 1933 the dollar was legally tied to gold, which gave the government a reason to gather it; the dollar hasn’t been convertible to gold since 1971, which is the story in why Nixon closed the gold window.

The honest case against worrying: there is no gold standard to defend, and a seizure today would be politically enormous. The honest case for keeping the joke alive: it happened once, in living memory of some readers’ grandparents, and privacy costs nothing. There’s no US registry of who owns gold. Dealers report certain transactions, which our guide on whether dealers report gold and silver to the IRS sets out exactly.

The United States wasn’t the only country to tell its people what gold they could keep.

• United Kingdom, 1966 to 1971. The Exchange Control (Gold Coins Exemption) Order 1966 let British residents hold no more than four gold coins minted after 1837; older coins were exempt. The 1971 order, in force from April 1, 1971, let gold coins be freely bought, sold and held again.
• Australia, 1959 to the mid-1970s. A 1959 law gave the government power to require gold to be handed over, and the public had to exchange gold coins for currency. The restrictions were lifted in the mid-1970s.
• India, 1968 to 1990. The Gold (Control) Act, 1968 banned private ownership of gold bars and coins; existing holdings had to be turned into jewelry and declared. It was repealed on June 6, 1990, with the government noting that the results “have not been encouraging.”

The certificate itself travels everywhere: pick your country above and it swaps in your own coins, your own waters and your own local legends, from the Loch Ness Monster to a Rhine siren to a leprechaun with opinions about ownership, plus a South African hippo who says he lost his Krugerrands in a boating accident too.