MacLorry -
Here are some links that you requested. The second link is a very good history lesson on banking and the history of money. It is about an hour long but you only need to listen to the first 39 minutes. After that the content is opinion, not history. The first 39 minutes is well worth your time and will give a good basis to understanding how we got to where we are today. All the links have some good content.
Okay, I see where you are getting this from. In the first link the author emphatically says
"Well, it means that every currency is �pegged� to the dollar." At the end of the piece the author says "I am not an economist", and in fact the author is James Lawson, a high school social studies teacher. This is hardly an authoritative source and his information is more than 30 years out-of-date.
The speaker on the video is Gary Korolev, a relative low level portfolio consultant at Charles Schwab. Note that a level 3 CFA means that he has at least a bachelor's degree and has taken a correspondence course from the CFA Institute, which is a not-for-profit organization that's not accredited by any private or state university.
At time 18:59 Korolev says "when congress was out of session they instituted this Federal Reserve act", which is complete nonsense. Some will argue that the Republican controlled Senate rammed the bill through when many members of the US Congress were home for the holiday, but congress was in session and the bill was also passed by the House before being signed into law by president Wilson.
Korolev goes on to make factual error after factual error such as saying the income tax was passed in preparation for WWI, which is wrong. The income tax was first passed into law in 1862 to support the Civil War effort. Congress then eliminated the income tax in 1872 and revived it 1894, but in 1896 the Supreme Court decided that the income tax was unconstitutional. It took over 15 years to override the Supreme Court with the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913. Any relationship between the passage of the Federal Reserve act, the 16th Amendment, and WWI was coincidental, not cause and effect as Korolev suggests. The guy's a hack.
The third link supports what I have been telling you with this statement.
In the late 1960s and early 70s the system suffered setbacks due to problems pointed out by the Triffin dilemma, a general problem with any fiat currency under a fixed exchange regimen, as the dollar was in the Bretton Woods system.Do the research on that statement and you'll find this statement about the
Nixon Shock By March 1976, all the major currencies were floating�in other words, exchange rates were no longer the principal method used by governments to administer monetary policy. It's as I have been telling you, major currencies have not been pegged to the dollar in more than 30 years.
The fourth link doesn't dispute anything I have been saying.
The U.S. is not alone in abandoning gold backed money, in fact
Currencies backed by precious metals simply no longer exist. Agree or not, here are a
bunch or reasons why no nation backs it's currency with gold.
