By Prof Rodrigue Tremblay
Global Research

“When every country turned to protect its own private interest, the world public interest went down the drain, and with it the private interests of all.”

—Charles Kindleberger (1910-2003), American economic historian, (in his book ‘The World Depression 1929-1939’, 1973.

“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition… More recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited, You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination… If we are not at the table, we are on the menu.”

—Mark Carney (1965- ), economist and Prime minister of Canada, in Davos, Switzerland, January 20, 2026.

“In the Great Depression in which I grew up and remember vividly, unemployment was over 25 percent, and over 35 percent where I lived. A grown man would work all day, 16 hours, for a dollar. I remember hundreds of people walking by, people who had come down from the North just to get warm. They would come to our house as beggars even though they might have a college education. People didn’t have money.”

—Jimmy Carter (1924-2024), 39th U.S. president (1977-1981), (in an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, on Feb. 4, 2009).

One year before the end of World War II, in 1944, representatives of some 44 countries met in an American town in New Hampshire and cooperated in establishing a new global monetary system based on the U.S. dollar, which was to be convertible into a fixed weight of gold. (Note: The U.S. then possessed 70% of the world’s gold reserves.)

This system lasted until 1971, when the Republican administration of Richard Nixon unilaterally severed the link between gold and the dollar, making the latter a purely fiat currency—that is, a currency entirely based on confidence in the U.S. monetary authorities to maintain its relative value.

Fifty-five years later, in 2026, the world is once again faced with the task of adjusting the international monetary system to new realities, but this time without a shred of international cooperation. On the contrary, the current Trump administration does not hesitate to insult, antagonize and sometimes threaten allied nations, many of which are public and private creditors of the American federal government. To attack one’s lenders is generally not the most appropriate thing to do!

What was the Bretton Woods Monetary System
Since the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1944, it was agreed by 44 countries that the U.S. dollar would be used as the principal international means of payments in the post WWII international monetary system. It was going to be backed by gold at the rate of one dollar being exchanged for 1/35 ounce of gold, (one ounce of gold being worth $35).

Other national currencies would have a fixed exchange rate vis-à-vis the dollar, to be adjusted only for structural balance of payments deficits or surpluses, as monitored by the newly created International Monetary Fund (IMF). Moreover, central banks would purchase and hold mainly American Treasury bonds as liquidity reserves to stabilize their currencies.

Why the international monetary system based on a fiat U.S. dollar has provided the United States with some exorbitant economic privileges
For many years, that one-sided international monetary system has created some exorbitant privileges for the United States.

Indeed, under such a system, the U.S. could not face a balance of payments problem because it was paying its imports with its own currency, which it could print at will.....more below

https://www.globalresearch.ca/coming-changes-international-monetary-system-dedollarization/5915570