Currency board Helena continue to operate currency boards, backing their locally printed currency notes with pound sterling reserves. A gold standard is a special case of a currency board where the value of the national currency is linked to the value of gold instead of a foreign currency. For a precise definition of what constitutes a currency board, including past examples, see: Currency board A currency board is a monetary authority which is required to maintain a fixed exchange rate with a foreign currency. This policy objective requires the conventional objectives of a central bank to be subordinated to the exchange rate
World currency Habsburg territories. Prior to and during most of the 19th century, international trade was denominated in terms of currencies that represented weights of gold. Most national currencies at the time were in essence merely different ways of measuring gold weights (much as the yard and the meter both measure length and are related by a constant conversion factor). Hence some assert that gold was the world's first global currency. The emerging collapse of the international gold standard around the time of World War I had significant implications for global trade. Before 1944, the world reference currency was the United Kingdom's