But plotting these data suggests that they did, just about then.
So what did I miss?
- Mike
End of the gold standard, which became official in 1971, is a candidate.
It was done, in my opinion, partially because the discipline had been
increasingly difficult for the expanding government sector, influenced
of course by those in the private sector. (influence buyers) Every trick
they could muster must have proved inadequate to loosen their shackles
sufficiently. Below states that 1933 was the beginning of the end; but
'71 was 100% freedom.
http://economics.about.com/cs/money/a/gold_standard.htm
A Very Brief History of the Gold Standard
If you would like to learn about the history of money in detail, there
is an excellent site called A Comparative Chronology of Money
<http://www.ex.ac.uk/%7ERDavies/arian/amser/chrono.html> which details
the important places and dates in monetary history. During most of the
1800s the United States was had a bimetallic system of money, however
it was essentially on a gold standard as very little silver was
traded. A true gold standard came to fruition in 1900 with the passage
of the Gold Standard Act. The gold standard effectively came to an end
in 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt outlawed private gold
ownership (except for the purposes of jewelery). The Bretton Woods
System
<http://economics.about.com/library/glossary/bldef-bretton-woods-system.htm>,
enacted in 1946 created a system of fixed exchange rates
<http://economics.about.com/library/weekly/aa022703a.htm> that allowed
governments to sell their gold to the United States treasury at the
price of $35/ounce. "The Bretton Woods system ended on August 15,
1971, when President Richard Nixon ended trading of gold at the fixed
price of $35/ounce. At that point for the first time in history,
formal links between the major world currencies and real commodities
were severed". The gold standard has not been used in any major
economy since that time.
Steve
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