Fiat money —mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the US insisted that they should be

On August 15, 1971, United States President Richard Nixon announced that foreign-held U.S. dollars would no longer be convertible into gold—thus stripping away the last vestige of the international gold standard.

This was the end of a policy that had been effective since 1931, and confirmed by the Bretton Woods accords at the end of World War II: that while United States citizens might no longer be allowed to cash in their dollars for gold, all U.S. currency held outside the country was to be redeemable at the rate of $ 35 an ounce.

By doing so, Nixon initiated the regime of free-floating currencies that continues to this day.

The consensus among historians is that Nixon had little choice. His hand was forced by the rising costs of the Vietnam War—one that, like all capitalist wars, had been financed by deficit spending.

The United States was in possession of a large proportion of the world’s gold reserves in its vaults in Fort Knox (though increasingly less in the late 1960s, as other governments, most famously Charles de Gaulle’s France, began demanding gold for their dollars); most poorer countries, in contrast, kept their reserves in dollars.

The immediate effect of Nixon’s unpegging the dollar was to cause the price of gold to skyrocket; it hit a peak of $ 600 an ounce in 1980. This of course had the effect of causing U.S. gold reserves to increase dramatically in value.

The value of the dollar, as denominated in gold, plummeted. The result was a massive net transfer of wealth from poor countries, which lacked gold reserves, to rich ones, like the United States and Great Britain, that maintained them.
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Nixon floated the dollar in order to pay for the cost of a war in which, during the period of 1970–1972 alone, he ordered more than four million tons of explosives and incendiaries dropped on cities and villages across Indochina—causing one senator to dub him “the greatest bomber of all time.”

The debt crisis was a direct result of the need to pay for the bombs, or, to be more precise, the vast military infrastructure required to deliver them. This was what was causing such an enormous strain on the U.S. gold reserves.

Many hold that by floating the dollar, Nixon converted the U.S. currency into pure “fiat money”—mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the United States government insisted that they should be.

In that case, one could well argue that U.S. military power was now the only thing backing up the currency. In a certain sense this is true, but the notion of “fiat money” assumes that money really “was” gold in the first place.

Really we are dealing with another variation of credit money.