But by the 1970s, the “Bretton Woods” system had become unsustainable: the U.S. no longer was strong enough economically to remain the world’s banker, primarily because of the huge costs of financing the Vietnam War. So Richard Nixon at that point made a decision to just dismantle the whole arrangement: in the early 1970s he took the United States off the gold standard, he raised import duties, he just destroyed the whole system totally. Well, after this international regulatory apparatus had been destroyed, we started to get speculation against currencies on an unprecedented scale, and
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