As hard as it may be to unpack the tangled mess that is the global monetary system, something I wrote many years ago about an important early stage of evolution away from gold exchange and into a very different arrangement perhaps best describes the process as well as the drastic implications we’d be left to deal with nearing six decades afterward.
Everyone is taught that Bretton Woods ended in August 1971. No. The formal end was only that; the functional end came much earlier. In fact, that structure had only really made it to November 1961 before seriously breaking down into practical default. It was then several countries banded together with the United States to create what was known as the London Gold Pool.
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