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A New System
The World has Grown Weary of US Financial Control
No guarantee for US at the next Bretton Woods
Control over the flow of money means control over so much more.
The Global Order — For Now
Just about every nation of the world has been under the oft-heavy-handed oversight of the United States of America since 1944. This was the pivotal year the Bretton Woods convention took place, when Washington gave birth to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, and of course to the gold-backed US Dollar which became the world’s premier reserve currency it remains today.
One may entertain the notion that perhaps we “earned the right” to oversee the global financial system after we “saved the world from Hitler” (which spilled far more Soviet blood than English), however the simple truth is that we sold war supplies to Allied nations and we got paid in gold. Afterward, the US had somewhere between 65–80% of the world’s official gold holdings. With a decimated Europe, economically and otherwise, and with America’s borders relatively untouched, we called the shots.
We convinced all of the Allied countries that the US Dollar was “as good as gold”. After all, what good are your trading partners if they have no gold to trade with? Thus we became the financial safe haven of the world.
The US might have been considered a mostly benevolent force in the world during those glorious decades of prosperity (at least, until Richard fucking Nixon). But alas, things were changing.
The postwar economic framework of big government, easy money, and low unemployment had served us well, but conditions were shifting. The huge economic boom after WWII and FDR‘s New Deal programs were running out of steam by the mid-60s.
Global competitors began crawling out of the rubble, and suddenly the US looked like it might not be the best place to keep money parked. The cost and mess of the Vietnam War didn’t help matters.
The Nixon Shock
The seventies was not a great decade for America. Because the dollar was still convertible to gold, many countries…
