In August 1971, Richard Nixon went on television and ended the world. Not with a war, though wars were already in progress. With a sentence: the United States would no longer convert dollars to gold. The Bretton Woods order, which had governed international finance since 1944, collapsed in a televised press conference. The dollar, which every central bank was accumulating and every major currency was pegged to, was suddenly backed by nothing except the continued willingness of the world to treat it as if it were backed by something.
Washington had three years to figure out what that something would be. The answer was oil.
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