The Trifen Dilemma

Post World War II, the US has 50% of the above ground gold in the world. And so when we became World Reserve currency status holder, it meant that by virtue of the fact that we're going to use our dollar for trade globally, there's going to be international demand for dollars. The entire world needed dollars, but their amount of dollars that they needed was actually small in comparison to how big we were in the global economy. But as we progressed through the 40s and the 50s and the 60s and into the 70s and especially post 1971, the global economy really started to boom. Nixon was forced to stop in 1971 because we were physically running out of gold.