Gold Standard, in the economic sense, a monetary system in which gold acts as the universal equivalent; in the legal sense, a form of organising money circulation, which is fixed by law and has gold coins in circulation (gold coin standard) or maintains, under certain circumstances, free exchange of banknotes for gold bullion (gold bullion standard), or else exchanges banknotes for foreign currency exchangeable for gold (gold exchange standard). The gold coin standard was established in Britain in the 1820s, in Germany and some other West European countries in the 1870s, in Russia and Japan in the 1890s. The USA and France also had a gold coin standard and partially a silver standard. The gold coin standard was the most stable monetary system of capitalism before its general crisis set in. World War I caused the collapse of the gold coin standard. Gold coins went out of circulation in nearly all the capitalist countries and gave way to depreciating paper money. In 1922, the Genoa conference recommended the gold exchange system as a world monetary system, and this was confirmed by the International Monetary Conference in Bretton Woods in 1944. It proved virtually impossible, however, to exchange currencies for gold because the USA first refrained from and then officially stopped exchanging dollars for gold. The tempestuous processes of inflation and depreciation of money over the last few years have led to a profound crisis of the monetary and financial system of capitalism. Devaluation of the currencies of many capitalist countries, including the US dollar, attests to the extreme instability of the present-day monetary system.