Recall how until the Nixon Shock of 1971, any non-American with large quantities of dollars could exchange them at will for gold owned by the US government at a fixed price of $35 per ounce. For as long as America sold more stuff to Europe and Asia than it imported from them, as it did between the war’s end and 1965, this trade surplus meant that every time America sold a jet or refrigerator in France or Japan, the foreign-held dollars that paid for them would be repatriated and America’s gold reserves would remain untouched. However, by the mid-sixties the United States had turned into a
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