Bretton Woods

(via Thoma, via Cecchetti and Schoenholtz)

The New York Sun longs for the days of Bretton Woods:

We hope they get around to the pattern of unemployment that has come ever more clearly into focus with each passing season of the age of fiat money. Between 1947 and 1971 — that is, in the first generation of the Bretton Woods agreements, under which America defined the dollar as a 35th of an ounce of gold —the unemployment rate in America averaged but 4.7%. Since 1971 —that is, since America’s abandoned Bretton Woods and opened the age of fiat money — unemployment has averaged 6.4%. 

Now we understand that the above-described coincidence does not establish causality. But what a job for all the Ph.D.s among those who manage what James Grant likes to call the Ph.D.-backed dollar. Let them look, too, to whether the Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978 turns out to have been a good idea. It was the law that gave the Fed its jobs mandate. When President Carter signed that dog’s breakfast, unemployment was 5.8%. It hasn’t been that low in the entire Obama presidency.

 Why did Nixon give up on the Gold Standard? It was too deflationary given the rest of the demand the economy was supplying?

In order to maintain the price of gold, the Treasury had to say it would pay a certain price of gold, but Nixon no longer wanted to do that because things would have been too volatile.

Piketty's argument is that inequality increased a politics moved to the right with Reagan and vice versa.

The social democratic state of 1947-1971 had high taxes and government spending and strong unions. That slowly went away as we entered the neoliberal era. Fiat money lessened the volatility.