The dollar glut is a term for the accumulation of American dollars outside of the United States, contrasted with the dollar gap, which lead to the creation of the Marshall Plan following World War II. The eventual shift to a dollar glut forced the end of the gold standard in the United States and led to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system.
The stability of the Bretton Woods system came to depend upon the ability of the US government to exchange dollars for gold at $35 an ounce. The American ability to fulfill this commitment began to diminish as the postwar dollar shortage was transformed into an overabundance of dollars, also known as the dollar glut.
Famous quotes containing the words dollar and/or glut:
“How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? If you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We can glut ourselves with how-to-raise children information . . . strive to become more mature and aware but none of this will spare us from the . . . inevitability that some of the time we are going to fail our children. Because there is a big gap between knowing and doing. Because mature, aware people are imperfect too. Or because some current event in our life may so absorb or depress us that when our children need us we cannot come through.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)