Birth of a Bretton Woods III – The Fall of the American Dollar King, the Emergence of Outside Money.

With Bitcoin as the future king?

At the end of the Second World War, the Bretton Woods agreements, which resulted from the conference held in the eponymous city, drew the broad outlines of the international financial system of the post-war period. It is notably following this conference that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was born. Although the missions of the IMF have changed somewhat over time, the institution still exists today.

The Bretton Woods system lasted until August 15, 1971, when Richard Nixon decided to end the convertibility of the U.S. dollar into gold. The system of fixed exchange rates collapsed definitively in March 1973 with the adoption of the floating exchange rate system, i.e., they were established according to market forces. On January 8, 1976, the Jamaica Accords officially confirmed the abandonment of the international legal role of gold. There was no longer an organized international monetary system.

For many economists, the international monetary system implicitly entered a new Bretton Woods system in the 1990s.