Gold also come into existence without debt, and these are honest money, but I just don't know under what circumstance the government abandoned the gold standard and FED started to print money for themselves
Gold comes into existence not as debt, but notes issued on gold does, because they fractional reserve lent gold notes. That's where the whole concept came from. It's the notes people use as money, because safekeeping and carrying around actual gold is a pain in the ass for regular people. This made it easy for the bankers to issue notes on gold that didn't exist in their vaults.
We bailed out the banks is how we got off the gold standard.
The banks issued at low interest too many notes on gold (as loans) in the 20's. People used this cheap money to buy stocks with. This created a giant bubble, much like the recent real estate bubble. Cheap money for no reason generally causes artificial asset bubbles. Anyway, the stock market crashed and debts couldn't be paid back, leaving all the notes out in the wild where they could put the gold reserves at risk, so FDR confiscated gold, and then repegged the price of gold at a higher dollar rate. This is a bank bailout. Google for "FDR gold confiscation" or something along those lines.
The next step was Bretton Woods 1944, which made the reserve currency of the world not gold anymore, but dollars, which was backed by gold still, but this didn't really matter since countries were to settle their trading deficits with dollars from here on out.
Lastly, I guess because probably too many notes were floating around again for the vietnam war maybe like you said, and Ft Knox was probably empty by then anyway, Nixon in 1971 pretty much just said "fuggit, no more gold for your dollars anymore. We're done". This is a bank bailout.
What we are left with as "reserves" instead of gold is "monetized government debt". There is no way this is sane. This is a shit reserve. Gold was relatively sane until the first bailout, but it still sucked because of the unpreventable fractional reserve lending ability it affords.
They kept the fractional reserve part going though, using government "promise to pay" as reserves for commercial bank money creation in the form of loans to you and me. And it's pretty much the same private banking corporations now creating our base money supply as back when we were on the gold standard, and since even before the FED was created in 1913. It's not the government in case anybody still thinks the government creates our money supply. The FED is accountable to these banking corporations, not to the government. The FED is these private banking corporations, essentially.
