Seems to me to have been a good thing. Took us back to before FDR’s government overreach. Prior to Nixon’s move, Americans could not own more than one ounce of gold, under penalty of imprisonment, fines and confiscation without compensation. Yet, other countries could gather up American dollars and waltz up to the treasury window and exchange it for gold, any time they pleased. Nixon took us back to the free market exchange of dollars for gold that the Framers intended.
And he replaced it with the Petro-Dollar, until Carter screwed that up with Iran.
It was Kennedy-Johnson who thought it could be “Guns AND Butter” in fighting the SE Asia wars. Nixon was facing the fact that Great Britain had gone off of the Gold Standard in the post WW1 period and now the Breton Woods agreement (post WW2 monetary structure) had become an anchor to the US!
What we conservatives FORGET is that Nixon was a RHINO, a near Democrat! He established the EPA with an UNLIMITED goal. He favored much of what the LEFT espoused!
NASDAQ loves this anniversary of FIAT money, it is what gives their traders dinner every nig\ht! For the CITIZEN, it is watching their savings dwindle through inflation!
Nixon’s greatest mistake was normalizing relations with Communist China. That is not debatable. At least the gold standard has pluses and minuses to the argument.
I had a very personal experience with that decision. My homeport until December 1970 was Yokosuka Japan. Under Bretton-Woods the yen was 360 to the dollar. I also had liberty in Hong Kong and Singapore and experienced similar exchange rates. I would put down a hundred-dollar bill at the exchange in Yokosuka and get back a stack of 5,000 and 1,000 yen colored notes I could barely hold in one hand. I had no problem spending that funny money.
Maybe we need to go to the “brick of 22 LRs” standard of currency. Or “Box of 9 mm” standard.
Before this we hardly ever heard the word “inflation” uttered around our house.
Tricky Dick gave us a lot of “gifts” like EPA, OSHA and so forth in addition to being “I am not a crook”.
Great guy. I think he was psychotic.