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Must be the collapse of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_... in 1968 and Nixon taking the US off the gold standard in 1971 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_s...

This is correct. The gold didn’t actually go anywhere; this is a chart of the amount held in reserve by governments, which started to go down when the link between gold and currency was severed.

The gold never goes anywhere, as Warren Buffett once wrote about the world's gold: “... The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.”

For a lot of the 1900s, it was illegal to possess more than 2 oz of gold in the US unless you were a licensed goldsmith. They also artificially pegged the value to the US dollar, so gold was de jure more valuable outside America. I think that ended in the 70s.