Saturday Class – The 55th Anniversary of Nixons Abandonment of the Bretton Woods System – August 15, 2026

Every week, Promethean Action holds a Saturday Class — a deep dive into the ideas, history, and strategic thinking that the mainstream won’t touch. We’d love for you to join us live. Sign up here and we’ll send you class details every week.Nixon told the country it was “temporary.”That was 55 years ago Saturday.The paper trail shows whose idea it really was — and why Trump’s Treasury says the reversal has already begun.On Sunday night, August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon looked into the cameras and announced that the United States would “suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold” — along with a 90-day freeze on wages and prices and a 10% tax on imports. He titled the speech “The Challenge of Peace.”“Temporarily” is now 55 years old. In this week’s Saturday Class, Will Wertz — who fought for a new Bretton Woods at Lyndon LaRouche’s side from 2000 until LaRouche’s death in 2019 — marks the anniversary the only way it should be marked: by reading the documents that show it was no emergency improvisation at all.It was the beginning of our country’s long slide into wretchedness — one that only began to turn around when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.— Tony Papert, opening the classThe machine that was switched offBretton Woods, July 1944: 44 allied nations gathered in New Hampshire and built the postwar monetary order on Hamilton’s American System. The dollar became the world’s reserve currency, pegged to gold at $35 an ounce, with every other currency pegged to the dollar. Fixed rates meant stability — and a World Bank whose mandate was not just rebuilding Europe, but industrializing the colonial world.FDR — a Hamiltonian whose great-great-grandfather worked with Hamilton at the Bank of New York — was explicit that the system existed to end the British, French, and Dutch empires for good. His son Elliott recorded Churchill’s protest that he had not become His Majesty’s Prime Minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire. Roosevelt’s answer:I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.— Franklin Roosevelt, as recorded in Elliott Roosevelt’s As He Saw ItBritain’s man at the conference, John Maynard Keynes, fought for the opposite: a supranational currency, the “bancor,” that would have kept the colonial system alive under new management. He lost — to Harry Dexter White and the US Treasury.And the system worked. From 1960 to 1975, fifty countries posted per-capita growth above 3% — ten in Central and South America, seven in the Middle East and North Africa, nine in Sub-Saharan Africa. Brazil and Mexico were doubling incomes every three decades. Walter Rostow told President Kennedy that Brazil, Argentina, India, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Greece would reach self-sustaining growth by 1970. BEWARE The British East India Company!: Toward an Alliance Between the USA, Russia, China, and India to Finally Defeat the British Empire by William WertzA comprehensive history of the existential war between the Anglo-Dutch imperial system and the American System of political economy — and why only a Four Power alliance of the USA, Russia, China and India has the strategic weight to finally dismantle it. GET IT ON KINDLE AND AMAZON The paper trailThe textbook story says Nixon faced a sudden run on the dollar and had no choice. Will spent the heart of the class on what the documents actually show: a squeeze from the outside, and a plan on the inside.The outside. In February 1965, Charles de Gaulle announced France would redeem its dollars for gold. In 1967, France physically moved its gold from New York to Paris, and the pound sterling was devalued 14.3%. By March 1968, the London gold market had to shut down for two weeks. Lyndon LaRouche forecast these crises — and what would follow — while the experts saw nothing coming.The inside. When Nixon took office in 1969, Paul Volcker — fresh from Chase Manhattan, where he had served as special assistant to David Rockefeller — became Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs. A secret Kissinger memorandum made him chairman of a permanent working group on international monetary policy, tasked with “contingency plans for response to potential currency crises.” The Volcker Group’s 1969 report put the objective in writing:Perhaps one of the most important long-term problems facing the US is how to move out of this commitment [to gold convertibility] in a graceful manner… A breaking of the link may have to come in the context of some crisis or a threatened run on the dollar.— the Volcker Group report, 1969, as read by Will in the classThen came the crisis the plan was waiting for:August 1969: the French franc is devalued 11.1%.May 1971: West Germany walks out of Bretton Woods, refusing to sell more Deutsche Marks for dollars.June 8, 1971: Nixon meets George Shultz and Milton Friedman — who had been making “the case for flexible exchange rates” since 1953.July: Treasury Secretary Connally orders Volcker to draw up plans for closing the gold window.August 6: a congressional subcommittee declares the dollar overvalued.August 11: Great Britain demands $3 billion in gold be moved from Fort Knox to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Shultz recommends closing the gold window the same day.August 13: the secret Camp David meeting — Shultz, Volcker, Arthur Burns. Two days later, Nixon gives the speech.Weeks after the broadcast, David Rockefeller — whose 1968 call for worldwide free trade had set the script — told the British National Committee of the International Chamber of Commerce that the world should “begin moving away from both gold and the dollar standard.” What we’d now call the deep state, Will argues, was an inside operation working hand-in-glove with Britain and France to finish off the American world system.Fifty countries became nineThe results were immediate and global. Of the fifty countries that grew above 3% under Bretton Woods, only nine ever repeated that performance after 1975. Nation after nation hit its manufacturing peak and slid back into raw-materials extraction: Colombia in 1970, Ghana in 1978, Nigeria in 1982, Brazil in 1986. America got the same medicine under a different label — outsourcing.The ideology arrived on schedule. The Club of Rome — midwifed by the Rockefeller Foundation — published The Limits to Growth and attacked the US space program by name, for the crime of spreading “technological optimism.” Robert McNamara’s World Bank pivoted from infrastructure to environmentalism: in its entire history it has financed exactly one nuclear power plant (Italy, 1959), formally banned nuclear lending in 2013 — and lifted that ban only last year.Volcker went on to the Federal Reserve, 20% interest rates, and his famous call for the “controlled disintegration” of the world economy. But note what he said should come after disintegration: “managed integration.” You know its brand name — globalization.One more number: the quadrillion-dollar derivatives market did not exist before floating exchange rates arrived in 1973. Restore fixed rates, and it disappears.Bretton Woods II is already underwayThis is why the anniversary is not nostalgia. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, 2024: “We’re in the middle of a Bretton Woods realignment. I’d like to be part of it.” And in 2025: “The original tariff man was Alexander Hamilton.”In his address to the Institute of International Finance, Bessent demanded the IMF and World Bank return to their original mandates — scolding the IMF for devoting itself to “climate change, gender and social issues” — welcomed the end of the World Bank’s nuclear ban, called for expanded lending to poorer countries, and summed it up in a sentence that could have been drafted in 1944: “America First does not mean America alone.”Will’s May class laid out the full architecture of a new Bretton Woods. This week he pressed on the pieces no one in the administration has touched yet:Gold and fixed exchange rates. No one in the administration has yet called for restoring a gold reserve system with fixed parities — the single step that erases the derivatives casino.The dollar stays. De-dollarization talk leads nowhere; it exists only because of sanctions that a new agreement would make unnecessary.Four Powers at the core. The US, Russia, China, and India together have the weight to overcome the UK and the EU — whose member nations must first take their sovereignty back to join.Finish the 1944 resolution. Liquidate the Bank for International Settlements, reinstate Glass-Steagall in every member nation, and reduce the Federal Reserve to an agent of the US Treasury issuing low-interest credit for production.And Will was blunt about the precondition: a full new Bretton Woods becomes possible “if the Republican Party wins the midterms and Trump has the freedom to act” in his final two years. The window is open now. It will not stay open by itself.The choice in the world is not between socialism and capitalism. It is between the American System of political economy and the British — the Anglo-Dutch imperial system that has wreaked havoc throughout the world since 1763.— Will WertzThat was Will’s message to the young people he addressed at the top of the class: the world you inherited wasn’t born yesterday. And if “socialism” tempts you, what you are actually rebelling against is not the American System — it’s the predatory British system that has run the world since August 15, 1971.It’s time we finished our revolution — and made it available to the rest of the world.Watch the full class — then send it to the young person in your life who thinks capitalism is the problem.—Promethean Action Editorial StaffPS: Will doesn’t stop at the Saturday Class. Follow him on X at @WFWertzJr for his running commentary on the fight for a new Bretton Woods.And if this class grabbed you, get his book — BEWARE the British East India Company! — the full 250-year history of the war between the American System and the British Empire, and the case for the Four Power alliance that can finally win it.