The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 85, March 2026 Page 11 The White House’s siege on the Federal Reserve reached a moment of clarity with the appointment of Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s successor, but Donald Trump’s machine has not stopped. The Justice Department’s criminal investigation into alleged wrongdoing in the renovation of the Fed’s buildings continues. The aim is to oust Powell not only from the presidency, but also from the board of the central bank in order to break his resistance to Trump’s line, which demands drastic cuts in interest rates. Trump wants a hot, hot, hot economy, according to The Wall Street Journal . The judicial persecution, denounced by Powell as an attempt to impose a monetary policy directed by political pressure or intimidation , has provoked a bipartisan reaction in the Senate. North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis has pledged to block the approval process for the designated successor to the Fed chair until the ca...

On August 15 th , 1971 (50 years ago) US President Richard Nixon declared that the ‘gold window’ was closed. The era of the convertibility of the dollar to gold was over, and the system that had been agreed upon by the victors of the war at Bretton Woods in 1944 collapsed: the regime of fixed but subject to periodical reviews exchange rates had lasted a quarter of a century. Jeffrey Garten, Bill Clinton’s former Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade and managing director of the Blackstone Group and Lehman Brothers, is now a historian who has written about Nixon’s decision. He recalls that the turnaround came at a time when the amount of dollars in circulation in the world was four times the amount of gold held in reserve, inflation was rising, Washington was withdrawing troops from Vietnam, and Nixon, the month before, had announced his visit to Beijing, a historic event. In 1959, the economist Robert Triffin had explained to Congress that there were absurdities assoc...