A Short History of the Dollar Standard

Robert Guttmann

Chapter Chapter 3 in Multi-Polar Capitalism, 2022, pp 73-116 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract We look at the Great Depression of the 1930s and Roosevelt’s “New Deal” reforms as setting the ground for a new accumulation regime known as Fordism which, once put fully into place at the conclusion of World War II, yields the postwar boom of the 1950s and 1960s. At the center of this regime was a gold-backed US dollar functioning as world money thanks to an institutional arrangement known as Bretton Woods (July 1944), supporting a growth-promoting wave of globalization. That regime begins to disintegrate in a decade-long stagflation crisis, following the collapse of Bretton Woods in August 1971. Painful anti-inflationary policies by the United States after October 1979 combine with pro-market “Reagan Revolution” reforms to preserve the US dollar’s world-money role, putting a modified dollar standard at the center of a new accumulation regime best characterized as finance-led capitalism. Driven by successive US-centered asset bubbles, that regime finds itself threatened by a global financial crisis in 2007 ushering in the Great Recession of 2008/09.

Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-88247-1_3

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-88247-1_3

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