O colapso de "Bretton Woods" ou a razao de Mises sobre Keynesianos e Friedman

"The Bretton Woods system was hailed by Establish­ment “macroeconomists” and financial experts as sound, noble, and destined to be eternal. The handful of genuine gold standard advocates were derided as “gold bugs,” cranks and Neanderthals. (...)

These Aus­trian economists [Mises, Hazlitt, Jacques Rueff - o economista de DeGaulle] were ridiculed by all other schools of economists and financial writers for even mentioning that gold might even be worth the absurdly high price of $70 an ounce. The Misesians predicted that the Bretton Woods system would collapse, since relatively hard money countries, recognizing the continuing de­preciation of the dollar, would begin to break the infor­mal gentleman’s rules of Bretton Woods and insistently demand redemption in gold that the United States did not possess.

The only other critics of Bretton Woods were the growing wing of Establishment economists, the Fried­manite monetarists. While the monetarists also saw the monetary crises that would be entailed by fixed rates in a world of varying degrees of currency inflation, they were even more scornful of gold than their rivals, the Keynesians.(...)

Keynesians and Friedmanites alike maintained that the gold bugs were dinosaurs. Whereas Mises and his followers held that gold was giving backing to paper money, both the Keynesian and Friedmanite wings of the Establishment maintained precisely the opposite: that it was sound and solid dollars that were giving value to gold. Gold, both groups asserted, was now worthless as a mon­etary metal. Cut dollars loose from their artificial connec­tion to gold, they chorused in unison, and we will see that gold will fall to its non-monetary value, then esti­mated at approximately $6 an ounce.(...)

The allegedly eternal system of Bretton Woods col­lapsed in 1968. The gold price kept creeping above $35 an ounce in the free gold markets of London and Zurich; while the Treasury, committed to maintaining the price of gold at $35, increasingly found itself drained of gold to keep the gold price down. Individual Europeans and other foreign­ers realized that because of this Treasury commitment, the dollar was, for them, in essence redeemable in gold bullion at $35 an ounce. Since they saw that dollars were really worth a lot less and gold a lot more than that, these foreigners kept accelerating that redemption.(...)

Gold and the dollar was thus cut loose in two stages. From 1968 to 1971, governments and their central banks maintained the $35 rate among themselves, while allow­ing a freely-fluctuating private gold market. From 1971 on, even the fiction of $35 was abandoned.

What then of the laboratory experiment? Flouting all the predictions of the economic Establishment, there was no contest as between themselves and the Misesians: not once did the price of gold on the free market fall below $35. Indeed it kept rising steadily, and after 1971 it vaulted upward, far beyond the once seemingly ab­surdly high price of $70 an ounce.[3]

Here was a clear-cut case where the Misesian forecasts were proven glori­ously and spectacularly correct, while the Keynesian and Friedmanite predictions proved to be spectacularly wrong." The Case for the 100 Percent Gold Dollar
by Murray N. Rothbard