Bretton Woods system and its gold standard fell apart 45 years ago this month
by Benn Steil
Market Watch
“The dollar and gold are synonymous,” Harry Dexter White, the architect of the Bretton Woods international monetary system, told Congress in 1945. “There is no likelihood that . . . the United States will, at any time, be faced with the difficulty of buying and selling gold at a fixed price freely.”
Under the Bretton Woods system, currencies were tied to the U.S. dollar at a fixed rate, and the dollar was in turn tied to gold at $35 an ounce. Today there is much nostalgia about Bretton Woods — a belief that the quarter-century from 1946 to Aug. 15, 1971 (when the system collapsed) was a golden era of monetary stability. But the reality was very different.