Nixon closes the gold window
President Nixon announced on national television on Sunday, August 15, 1971 that the United States would 'temporarily' suspend the convertibility of dollars into gold. The suspension was never reversed. The Bretton Woods system collapsed over the next two years as other currencies were forced to float against the now-unconvertible dollar. For the first time in the history of the world, every major currency was fully fiat — backed by nothing but the issuing government's word. Gold rose from $35 per ounce to over $800 within eight years.
Nixon's announcement was part of a broader 'New Economic Policy' that also included a 90-day wage-and-price freeze and a 10 percent import surcharge. The wage-and-price controls failed within two years (as Diocletian's had in 301 AD). The gold-window closure, by contrast, proved permanent — no major economy has returned to any form of metallic standard in the 54 years since.
05 · Hyperinflation Century
With gold constraints effectively removed after World War I, the 20th century produced the most spectacular currency collapses in recorded history. Weimar Germany, Hungary, Greece, China, Yugoslavia, and dozens of lesser-known cases all reached true hyperinflation — monthly inflation above 50 percent, continuing for months or years. The Hungarian pengő collapse of 1946 remains the worst on record, with prices doubling every 15 hours at its peak. The era ended with Nixon's closure of the gold window in August 1971, which made every major currency in the world fully fiat for the first time in history.
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