this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
244 points (100.0% liked)
HistoryPhotos
1208 readers
281 users here now
HistoryPhotos is for photographs (or, if it can be found, film) of the past, recent or distant! Give us a little snapshot of history!
Rules
- Be respectful and inclusive.
- No harassment, hate speech, or trolling.
- Foster a continuous learning environment.
- No genocide or atrocity denialism.
- Photos MUST be at LEAST 10 years old, and ideally over 20. We appreciate that we are living through events which will become history, but this is ultimately not a comm for news or current affairs, but events which have occurred some time in the past.
Related Communities:
founded 8 months ago
MODERATORS
Ever since I learned of this, I think of it frequently:
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
so wtf happened in 1971 then?
Well, first of all, absolutely nobody was kung-fu fighting. It was virtually unheard of.
Well, that's more than a little bit frightening.
Who were going to be as fast as lightning then?
My guess is the end of the gold standard as its being referenced quite a few times across the webpage and it's at the inflexion point of lots of these graphs.
But I didn't check if it was a major cause or just correlation.
Ya, I'm always called a simpleton for saying ditching the gold standard was a mistake. But somehow a system where banker bros can just print money for each other is better?
Why should that dollar I have in my bank account be worth less year after year? Why should the 1% have access to a system of near limitless loans, allowing them to buy up and monopolize every aspect of life, from food, to housing, to healthcare?
Shits fucked if you ask me.
The problem with the gold standard was that it was already dead when Bretton Woods ended. America, fuelled by post-war growth and their consumerist brand of imperialism, had printed dollars like crazy and by the 1970s there was just no way in hell the US could honour the worth of the dollar in gold if people started actually claiming their rights. This was not just an American problem, as other currencies were guaranteed not in gold directly but indirectly through the dollar. Printing more money than you have gold is fine in times of growth, but once markets lose trust and people start claiming their gold the system collapses.
The gold standard is not compatible with the model of infinite growth and IMF style capitalist imperialism. This doesn't make it a bad idea—probably on the contrary—my point is just that Bretton Woods could not really be saved by the time it died. Killing it off was the only option because it had already been abused to death in a period in which America saw huge economic growth.
Yeah, what happened in 1971 is the end of the gold standard. But what happened in the late 60s, and early 70s was a major increase in the workforce as boomers began entering it, and increasingly women were working careers instead of staying home to raise the children. Meanwhile Japanese and European manufacturing were finally recovering from the war, so the American prosperity from being the only major manufacturing power aside from the much smaller countries in the Americas and Oceania was ending. Later in the 70s the MBAs would begin taking power economically, and the new deal reforms began being whittled down in the name of deregulation, especially in the 80s.
I'm old enough and have been on the internet long enough to be able to spot gold nuts…
The Bretton Woods system was built on Keynesian economics (and Keynes himself played a big role in it). When Bretton Woods collapsed the ideas of assholes from the Chicago school of economics (such as Friedman) took over and shaped monetary policy, fucking over absolutely everything in their path.
It's not the collapse of Bretton Woods as much as the absolutely shitshow that replaced it. American leaders designed a state ideology of capitalism and convinced every idiot it the country to rally behind it.
end of the gold standard