What Wall Street Heard on a Sunday Night in 1971

On Sunday night, August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon went on television and suspended the dollar's convertibility into gold for foreign governments, the move known as the Nixon Shock, or closing the gold window. The Bretton Woods system did not vanish in that hour, but the gold window did, and the way governments priced money changed with it. This video follows that change as a piece of plumbing, not a conspiracy. It starts with the $35-an-ounce gold price that anchored Bretton Woods from 1944, then the warning Robert Triffin gave Congress in 1959, the London Gold Pool's collapse in 1968, and the weekend at Camp David when Nixon, Connally, Burns, and Volcker decided to suspend convertibility. It covers the Smithsonian attempt to rebuild a fixed system, the second devaluation, and the float in 1973 — and why the dollar's role did not disappear when the metal promise did. You will see the reserve numbers that still get cited, including the dollar's share of official foreign-exchange reserves in early 2026, and the separate fact that the dollar still sits on one side of most global foreign-exchange trades. The Lone Ledger looks at the ledgers, rules, and institutions that still set prices after the people who wrote them are gone. Contact: theloneledger.contact@gmail.com © The Lone Ledger 2026