From: [1] http://www.thegoldstandardnow.org/key-blogs/110-the-moment-for-gold

This is what happened in the early 1980s, which we’d thought was a marvelous moment for monetary reform. After the great inflation unleashed by the failure of the Johnson and Nixon administrations to make hard fiscal choices during the Vietnam War — Johnson insisted on both guns and butter — the dollar collapsed to less than an 800^th of an ounce of gold from the 35^th of an ounce that it had been at, by law, during the years of Bretton Woods. So in 1981 Congress set up the United States Gold Commission, also known as the Reagan Commission, to look into what role gold might play in a monetary reform in America.

Eventually the commission rejected the idea of a return to gold, though it issued a famous minority report by two of its members, Lewis Lehrman and Ron Paul. But a the dollar was rescued, at least for a while, by the rise of Paul Volcker to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve. His was a long reign of tight money that conquered inflation and started moving the value of the dollar back up. Mr. Volcker was able to do this because his tight money regime was operated in tandem with the tax cuts and other supply-side measures being put through by President Reagan.

The combination of policies touched off the Reagan boom, which ran through what the editor of the Wall Street Journal called “seven fat years,” and eventually it was extended into the 1990s and, after some retreats, into the 21^st Century under George Bush. It is astonishing, at least to us, to think that at the start of George W. Bush’s administration, in January 2001, a dollar was worth a 265^th of an ounce of gold.

Read More: [2] http://www.thegoldstandardnow.org/key-blogs/110-the-moment-for-gold