As Our Money Hits the Big 5–0, Is It Still Fit For Purpose?
Or does middle age mean passing the baton?
On Aug. 15, 2021, the money we use officially turned fifty years old. In human terms, this is an important milestone, but in the financial world celebrations were, well, muted.
Of course, there has always been and always will be money in some form, but only a relatively small number of people understand that the money we use on a day-to-day basis is barely out of the “experimental” stage.
In fact, I am personally older than our entire global monetary system, a thought I find utterly fascinating to this day.
Prior to August 1971, we had been using, at least in some way or another, a gold-backed system which limited the money that could be created by central governments around the world. But when Bretton-Woods sceptic French President Charles de Gaulle started the process that would ultimately see his successor, French President Georges Pompidou, send a warship to New York to collect the gold held on their behalf by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, it marked the end of the era.
President Richard Nixon announced to the nation in a carefully timed TV broadcast (it went out on a Sunday evening to a unexpecting audience) that the gold standard was over. From that day on…
