Agreed, but I personally don’t think gold had much to do with it. The reason FDR banned the private ownership of gold was that gold was the source of money those days since we were on the gold standard, and he wanted to use every bit of the nation’s gold supply he could get his hands on to increase the base for the issuance of paper money. We were in a sustained deflation, and increasing the supply of money was the way to get out. Since we were on the gold standard, there was no way to do it other than for the government to take control of all the gold it could lay its hands on. In retrospect, a better way to handle the matter would have been just to print more money, but the philosophy of the age was against that.