When I was a young clerk on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1971, the US ran out of money and defaulted on its debts.
Now, they didn’t say it that way. But by moving away from the gold standard — the idea that people could exchange paper dollars for gold — money, as we understood it, ended.
I expected the stock market to plunge the next day, but when the opening bell rang the market was way up. And it went on to rise nearly 25%.
That surprised me, because I had never experienced a currency devaluation before. But when I looked into it, I discovered the exact same thing happened in 1933 and it had the exact same effect.
But in both cases, breaking the link to gold allowed the US to continue spending more than it earned, and so the value of each dollar fell.
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