Paying for the Vietnam war. Moving away from guns vs. butter to guns and butter.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Kurtz Sent: Friday, May 14, 2010 7:11 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW: this might be of interest 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 <http://www.ex.ac.uk/%7ERDavies/arian/amser/chrono.html> Comparative Chronology of Money 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 <http://economics.about.com/library/glossary/bldef-bretton-woods-system.htm> Woods System, 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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