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It's a reference to a website[1] which talks about the divorcing of the USD from the gold standard.

[1]https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/



The funniest thing with this idea is that in practice nothing of economic significance really happened in 1971: the supply of dollar used on the international trade market[1] being each year more important than the amount of gold stored in Fort Knox had been a hot topic during most of the sixties already (and French president de Gaulle tried to fight against that as early as 1965!).

What happened in 1971 (the suspension of the official conversion between gold and dollar) is just the political acknowledgement that the fiction of a gold/dollar parity was untenable any longer, but economically speaking, the divorce occurred during the previous decade (and then ironically the charts on that website show you how little correlation there is between this phenomenon and the later economic consequences).

What really happened in that period was in 1973: Yom Kippur War and as a consequence OPEC shutting down the oil supply, derailing the industrial economies and the Welfare State. A crisis that was thereafter co-opted by neo-liberal movement, bringing the world back to the pre-war situation regarding inequalities and economic growth.

[1] the domestic supply of dollar had been much higher than the gold reserves for pretty much the entirety of the existence of the US dollar, because that's pretty much how banking works since the end of the middle ages!




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