Meanwhile, the Italian Exchange Office announces that tourists not resident in Italy can exchange up to 50 dollars per person and per day in banknotes and “traveler’s checks” for 617.80 lire (since the central parity of the lira against the dollar fixed at 625). Almost a curiosity for us today, the prices of the main foreign currencies: 152.75 lire for 1 Swiss franc; 112.20 the French franc; 1,497.75 the pound; 180.845 the German mark.
The importance of an effective international monetary system to “convey” world trade is evident, not only for economic development, but even as a contribution to political detente. Already before the end of the Second World War, in July 1944, on the initiative of the American President Roosevelt, the founding conference of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank was held in a small town in New Hampshire, Bretton Woods. Gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel, the delegates agreed to make the currencies convertible after the end of the conflict, keeping gold as the basis of the system, but making the dollar the only reserve currency, also due to the enormous economic and military potential. of the United States. The adhering countries fixed for their own currency an official parity with the dollar, in turn linked to gold: thus the Gold Exchange Standard was born.
Some of the 44 participants in the Bretton Woods conference did not accept the agreements: outside the Soviet Union and the satellite countries of the socialist bloc, the original members were 39; then the nations that had lost the war entered, such as Italy, Federal Germany and Japan and gradually the Asian and African countries of recent independence. The US balance of payments deficit was initially seen as a favorable phenomenon, due to the increase in gold and dollar reserves by the countries of Western Europe (especially the EEC) and Japan.
The monetary crises of the second half of the 1960s
But the climate of confidence gradually deteriorated due to the monetary crises of the second half of the 1960s: devaluation of the British pound (and of the currencies economically connected to it) in November 1967; speculation on gold – starting from General de Gaulle’s France – and consequent creation of the free gold metal market (1968); devaluation of the French franc (August 1969) and revaluations of the German mark (in 1969 and again in 1971).
In those years, the speculative movements of multinational companies and large banks against the fixed parities of Bretton Woods also became massive. The drastic measures announced by Nixon on August 15, 1971 will be followed in December by agreements at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, which will sanction new exchange rates and an initial devaluation of 10% of the official price of gold, which has risen to 38 dollars. A new devaluation of 11% will be decided in 1973, with gold at $ 42.22.