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The price of gold, as denominated in US dollars, was stable until the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the mid-1970s. The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, and Australia and other countries, a total of 44 countries [1] after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement.
Mount Washington Hotel. The Bretton Woods Conference, formally known as the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, was the gathering of 730 delegates from all 44 allied nations at the Mount Washington Hotel, in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, to regulate what would be the international monetary and financial order after the conclusion of World War II., [1] likewise with ...
The Nixon shock was the effect of a series of economic measures, including wage and price freezes, surcharges on imports, and the unilateral cancellation of the direct international convertibility of the United States dollar to gold, taken by United States president Richard Nixon on 15 August 1971 in response to increasing inflation.
The Bretton Woods System was founded on the principle that the U.S. was a steady and reliable global economy; the U.S. had over 60% of the world's total gold in its reserve. However, starting in the 1950s, the U.S. began to accrue consistent balance-of-payment debt.
The Death of Money is a 1993 book [1] (and an article with the same title) by Joel Kurtzman, a former editor of Harvard Business Review.Kurtzman uses the "death of money" to refer to a change in the economic nature of money in the United States following Richard Nixon's removal of US dollar from the gold standard (as in the Bretton Woods system), informally referred to as the Nixon shock.
The Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 established an international fixed exchange rate system based on the gold standard, in which currencies were pegged to the United States dollar, itself convertible into gold at $35/ounce.
In order to maintain the Bretton Woods system, the US had to run a balance of payments current account deficit to provide liquidity for the conversion of gold into U.S. dollars. With more US dollars in the system than were backed with gold under the Bretton Woods agreement, the US dollar was overvalued relative to gold.
The crash came after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system over the previous two years, with the associated 'Nixon Shock' and United States dollar devaluation under the Smithsonian Agreement. It was compounded by the outbreak of the 1973 oil crisis in October of that year. It was a major event of the 1970s recession.