Jeffrey Garten

speaker

224 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 3 Jun

Jeffrey Garten’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Story of Money · Why Richard Nixon torpedoed the global monetary system · 3 Jun 2026 podcast

They were super, super competitive.

I'll give you just one number.

Between 1965 and 1970, America's exports of goods increased 100%.

Germany's increased 200%.

And Japan's increased 400%.

So the whole system was under great strain, and the US basically was confronting a lack of competitiveness, a lot of the same issues that we have now.

the dollar started to flow into Germany.

There was a sense that Germany was going to have to revalue its currency.

And the speculators were betting that it would, and so they wanted to get in early.

And massive amounts of dollars flowed into Germany such that it had to basically stop accepting dollars altogether.

And it was really clear the US was petrified that now countries were going to come with all these dollars and ask for the gold.

And there wasn't enough gold.

And so if there had been this gold rush, so to speak, the US would have de facto defaulted on a treaty commitment.

And they were not only worried that this would be disastrous for the global financial system, but that it would call into question all other U.S.

commitments on the security side.

So by the end of May, Nixon and his close advisors really began to think through what they had to do.

Probably so.

But countries were holding off for the most part because the Bretton Woods system had been so successful before.

there was enormous fear about what would happen if the system cracked.

And so the central banks were actually in very close coordination.

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