Bretton Woods 2.0 is Knocking at Our Door, And It’s Not Here To Help

• Bretton Woods 2.0 is Knocking at Our Door, And It’s Not Here To Help
  by CHARLIE SHREM, https://cointelegraph.com/
  A second Bretton Woods era will be even more centralized and even further from a true democracy.
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  Barely 100 years ago at the start of the 20th century, people were able to exchange dollars for gold at their local bank. While gold was too hard to trade between people, banking institutions held gold and gave people cash for it. This was during what was known as the gold standard. Each sovereign currency’s value was determined relative to a fixed amount of gold. However, in the decades ahead, that standard quickly changed.
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  Toward the end of World War II, dozens of powerful people organized a meeting to discuss a new monetary agreement designed to minimize the economic damage done by the war. This meeting was named after the location where it took place: Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the United States.
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  It was a long-term plan with several parts that spanned over decades. And the Bretton Woods delegates decided that multiple fiat currencies would now be backed by the U.S. dollar as opposed to gold itself. At first, the dollar proved to be stable enough to support the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944 — until it wasn’t in the decades ahead. During the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon called for more money. There wasn’t any more money in circulation. So, he started printing.
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  In 1971, President Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility to gold, which effectively ended the Bretton Woods agreement after nearly 30 years. The removal of the gold standard turned each country’s fiat currency into a floating exchange rate that was no longer fixed. Money was not measured by the dollar anymore; now, each currency was measured in relation to every other currency, with prices that constantly changed, creating foreign exchange market volatility.
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