Activity

By 1987 the dollar had devalued to levels that were jeopardizing Wall Street . in the same year a G7 meeting was held in Paris at which American officials pushed the opposite way, towards a strengthening of the dollar. At that meeting, which is now known as the Louvre Accord, Washington bullied the Europeans into accepting coordinated efforts to strengthen the dollar.

By the Plaza Accord, struck in 1985, Tokyo was forced to appreciate the yen substantially in relation to the dollar, with the Deutsche Mark compelled to follow suit.

convince German voters that monetary union was Germanizing France and exporting Teutonic discipline to Latin Europe, turning grasshoppers into ants rather than importing French sloth into Germany

the libretto of France's defeat had been written back in 1983

[...] The gold standard was underpinned by the idea of depoliticizing money by linking its quantity to the amount of gold--a metal that politicians could not conjure up from thin air since it was provided exogenously by nature. Today the same fantasy of apolitical money can be foudn not just in the…