Faced with the possibility of a global economic depression that would leave America facing down a nuclear-armed Soviet Union alone, the Americans did the only thing they could. In a series of steps in the early 1970s, the Nixon administration cut the cord and put the U.S. dollar on a full, free float. For the first time, a major government didn’t even pretend to have anything in the vault. The only “asset” backing the dollar was the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government. The very nature of America’s post-1971 globalization-fueled alliance gambit was quite literally based upon none
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