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And context changes everything. Go to Bloomberg.com to get context. Welcome to the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. I'm Tom Keene always with Michael McKee.

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cloud Bloomberg. he watches Japan. He watches gold. I want to get to Japan in just a moment.

But let's talk a little bit of that history. Nixon probably didn't realize

he was doing it at the time, but he profoundly altered the global economy by taking the U.S.

off the gold standard.

And he did a little more than just take us off the gold standard.

That same day, he also slammed the door shut on imports of Japanese vehicles which is probably why the stock market went up next day all those big automakers and the in the Dow Jones and he also introduced the first phase of wage and price controls against a whopping 2.5% inflation rate

because he was afraid of national security. The Vietnam War was heating the

economy over the time. So a lot of things happened that day.

I think that the floating currency was happening.

Anyhow, if you read Robert Solomon's book on the history of the world financial system,

you know, he says the most outstanding characteristic of the period of fixed exchange

rates was how often they adjusted them.

And like every month, the finance ministers were getting together someplace nice to re-rig

fixed exchange rates.

So that was coming anyhow. It was a shock to the French

that he wouldn't give them their gold, but it wasn't really a shock to the world

economy as much as some of the other things he did that day. Well historically

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