Nixon shock
Nixon suspends dollar-gold convertibility and announces a 90-day economic freeze
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗One television address simultaneously froze American pay and prices, taxed many imports an extra 10 percent, and shut the gold window used by foreign central banks.
Sunday evening, 15 August 1971
In a nationally broadcast Sunday-evening address on 15 August 1971, President Richard Nixon announced what his administration called a New Economic Policy.
He directed Treasury Secretary John Connally to suspend, with limited exceptions, conversion of dollars into gold or other reserve assets — closing the gold window used by foreign monetary authorities.
Three shocks in one speech
The same address ordered a 90-day freeze on wages and prices, which administration records and later descriptions clarify included rents, and imposed a temporary 10-percent surcharge on dutiable imports. Nixon also announced proposed tax and spending measures intended to stimulate employment and restrain inflation.
The package had been settled at Camp David over the preceding weekend, where Nixon met with fifteen advisers — among them Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns, Connally, and Treasury undersecretary Paul Volcker.
A temporary suspension that was never reversed
The measures removed dollar-gold convertibility and stable par values, two central features of Bretton Woods, although governments attempted a revised fixed-rate arrangement in December. The suspension was announced as temporary; the window was never reopened.
What closed was official international conversion by foreign monetary authorities, not ordinary domestic redemption of paper dollars, which had effectively ended decades earlier. The announcement was popular domestically but shocked allied governments, which regarded its unilateral form with alarm.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 3 audit passes Date corrected
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Date corrected. The research places this at 1971-08-15.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The listed year can be resolved to the exact date August 15, 1971 from Nixon's address and the official chronology.
- Historians describe the end of Bretton Woods as either the August 1971 suspension or a 1971–73 process. The Smithsonian Agreement briefly restored revised fixed rates in December 1971; widespread floating followed in March 1973.