This month marks 55 years since President Richard Nixon closed the “gold window,” severing the last link between the US dollar and gold. Under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, foreign countries pegged their currencies to the US dollar, which was then pegged to a fixed value of gold. Foreign countries could exchange their dollars for gold at a rate of 35 dollars per ounce. In the late 1960s, concerns about the dollar’s stability increased because of President Lyndon Johnson’s spending on the...






















