In 1971, Nixon intervened to address rising inflation by instituting domestic price controls and a blanket 10% import tariff. He also officially ended the direct convertibility of dollars to gold, untethering the dollar and effectively kicking off the fiat currency era.
Nobody ever mentions the French.
The US government was spending so much money on their little hobby of war in Vietnam that other countries started to doubt that US dollars could be exchanged for gold, as the US government had always promised. So France loaded up a destroyer with pallets of Federal Reserve Notes and sailed it into New York Harbor, asking for the gold which they had been assured existed. Naturally it was a lie and no such gold existed. The US government could not pay what it had borrowed. So Nixon took us off the gold standard, poof. Gone.
And after 1971 the US working class got crushed. This story about the French is never told, and if it is it's mentioned in passing, in a single sentence.
Nobody ever mentions the French.
The US government was spending so much money on their little hobby of war in Vietnam that other countries started to doubt that US dollars could be exchanged for gold, as the US government had always promised. So France loaded up a destroyer with pallets of Federal Reserve Notes and sailed it into New York Harbor, asking for the gold which they had been assured existed. Naturally it was a lie and no such gold existed. The US government could not pay what it had borrowed. So Nixon took us off the gold standard, poof. Gone.
And after 1971 the US working class got crushed. This story about the French is never told, and if it is it's mentioned in passing, in a single sentence.