That Vietnam-era economic crisis — who was behind it? Who d’ya think?

“Mr. Derbyshire—Hayward left out that the gold run was led by France. If

my recollection of high school economics is good, this was an artifact of

the post-war international monetary framework. Via wartime looting or

spending, many countries had no gold reserves to back their currencies. The

US gave mucho $ to those countries to hold as reserves. The problem was that

France decided to cheat the system by exchanging its $ for the US Treasury’s

gold at the nominal price (which was much less than the market price of

gold).”