Migeru:

I listed de Gaulle because of the Empty-Chair crisis (as evidence that France does call the shots - our own Jerome never tires to remind us that the day France threatens to pull out of the EU, Germany will fold again)

That's my original point; if Hollande has the cajones to do so.

Hey, Grandma Moses started late!

Gah, that story seems to lend itself to confusion, partly because it doesn't seem to be well-documented anywhere. But Pompidou was following in De Gaulle's footsteps, and the gesture was just gesticulation. Bretton Woods was already dislocated.

As for France having been, especially in the years of the Six and then Ten, an obvious major power if not the major power in the "European project", I'm not attempting to deny it.

And that was threatened, in the mind of the sound money crowd, by the ballooning US government debt due to the Vietnam War buildup among other things, as well as by the US' trade balance reversing from net exporter to net importer (due in part to Germany and Japan taking over as exporters of last resort as a result of the success of post-war US global macro policy).

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

The reason people thought the gold standard was a good thing is that it was thought to maintain stable purchasing power. This obviously failed during those financial crises when gold was hoarded and its purchasing power increased, but that was somehow OK. None-the-less that was how Morgan and other bankers obtained lots of southern real estate on the cheap after the Civil War - once they had successfully lobbied to get the country back on a gold standard. They had enough of the gold that, by withdrawing it from circulation, they could create a depression. Prices fell and they bought property on the cheap.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."