Business and Personal Finance Dictionary

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• BRETTON WOODS
  
  Township in New Hampshire where the "Bretton Woods Agreement" was finalized after World War II after negotiations mainly between the British and the U.S.. The system agreed upon has also been called the "dollar-gold equivalence standard", because it gave the status of official global reserve currency to the US$, on the condition that the U.S. guarantee the convertibility of dollars into gold on demand of other Central Banks. In August 1971, President Nixon unilaterally reneged on that latter clause by "closing the gold window" when France and the UK requested such redemptions. This also inaugurated the era of "floating" exchanges in which the values of each currency and of gold would be left free to be determined by market forces.
  
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