Bretton Woods system
The post-war architecture of world finance: currencies fixed to the dollar, and the dollar convertible into gold at an announced price.
How to read the number
It tied the world's money to the gold reserve of a single country. When dollars held abroad outgrew the gold in the vault, convertibility was ended — that happened in 1971.
When the metric lies
The end of convertibility is often named as the start of the inflation of the 1970s, but it coincided with the oil shock, and one data series cannot apportion blame between the two.
Also known as: bretton woods