The Nixon Shock

The night the dollar left gold. The world's savings became a promise.

August 15, 1971, announced on a Sunday night between TV westerns: the dollar's gold window closed 'temporarily,' wage-price controls imposed, and the Bretton Woods world ended in a fifteen-minute address drafted at Camp David by men sworn to secrecy that weekend. The temporary suspension is now fifty-five years old. Every currency on Earth has floated against pure sovereign promise since — the monetary regime under which all subsequent money folklore (gold questions, dollar-collapse literature, CBDC anxieties) was written. The archive files it as the quiet constitutional amendment nobody voted on.