“Your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today,” President Nixon proclaimed on television with a straight face.
“The effect of this action, in other words, will be to stabilize the dollar.”
The date was August 15, 1971. President Nixon just announced that he was closing what was known as the “gold window”. This was the system through which foreign countries could redeem US dollars for physical gold upon demand.
The gold window was a fixture of the Bretton Woods System of 1944. That was the international agreement which established the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
What we’re talking about here is trust. The idea was that if the United States started printing too much money, the rest of the world could trade their dollars in for gold.
After all, nobody wants to hold a currency that somebody else can create from nothing anytime they want.
The story behind Nixon’s “gold shock” is very nuanced. But what followed isn’t…
Continue reading “Why it’s gotten tough out there…”