Nixon Shock

The Nixon Shock was a series of economic measures taken by United States President Richard Nixon in 1971 including unilaterally canceling the direct convertibility of the United States dollar to gold. It helped end the existing Bretton Woods system of international financial exchange, ushering in the era of freely floating currencies that remains to the present day.

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Famous quotes containing the words nixon and/or shock:

    The Washington press corps thinks that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is the only member of the Nixon Administration who has any credibility—and, as one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe she believes what she is saying ... it is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six.
    Nora Ephron (b. 1941)

    Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)