The Nixon Shock: The Golden Rule at Bretton Woods (Part 1)

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The Nixon Shock: The Golden Rule at Bretton Woods (Part 1)

Daniel Gamboa

and

Matt Harris

Aug 07, 2025

Transcript

Gold, power, war, and spies—this series has it all. On August 15th 1971, President Nixon announced that he was suspending the dollar’s convertibility into gold. This announcement upended the Bretton Woods monetary system and set the world on a course towards floating exchange rates with the US dollar as a fiat reserve currency for world trade—a system that is under significant pressure today.

In the first episode of the series, we tell the story of how an ambitious, little-known American technocrat—Harry Dexter White—went toe-to-toe with the world-famous John Maynard Keynes to rewrite the rules of global finance.

Bretton Woods wasn’t just a conference. It put the US dollar at the center of a new monetary order, backed by roughly two-thirds of the world’s gold and America’s unrivaled economic power after World War II. Delegates representing 44 nations agreed to fixed exchange rates, created the IMF and World Bank, and made the dollar “as good as gold.”

We trace how global leaders were traumatized by the economic chaos following World War I—trade wars, currency collapses, and the Great Depression. Against this backdrop, we explore how White moves from the periphery of academic economics to play a central role in FDR’s Treasury. From there he outmaneuvers John Maynard Keynes and secures American primacy, despite also moonlighting as a Soviet spy.

This episode covers the genesis of a system every president from Truman to Nixon would struggle to defend—and the traces of which still shape the world economy today.