Word: bullion
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...international trade and fund postwar reconstruction, the member states agreed to fix their exchange rates by tying their currencies to the U.S. dollar. American politicians, meanwhile, assured the rest of the world that its currency was dependable by linking the U.S. dollar to gold; $1 equaled 35 oz. of bullion. Nations also agreed to buy and sell U.S. dollars to keep their currencies within 1% of the fixed rate. And thus the golden age of the U.S. dollar began...
...Bretton Woods system itself collapsed in 1971, when President Richard Nixon severed the link between the dollar and gold - a decision made to prevent a run on Fort Knox, which contained only a third of the gold bullion necessary to cover the amount of dollars in foreign hands. By 1973, most major world economies had allowed their currencies to float freely against the dollar. It was a rocky transition, characterized by plummeting stock prices, skyrocketing oil prices, bank failures and inflation...
...only thanks to the potato - domesticated in Peru's uplands some 8,000 years earlier - that Spanish slave drivers could feed the army of conscripted miners they deployed to dig up the silver. As John Reader recounts in Propitious Esculent: The Potato in World History, the flood of bullion proved more than the Old World could absorb. The unintended result: inflation that shredded Europe's social fabric, disrupted its monetary system and debased the precious metal itself. Blame it on the potato...
...that popular history can. For example, he writes that today's sprawling multinational corporations are modeled on the crown-backed trading houses of England, Portugal and Holland, whose empires themselves followed a continuum stretching back to the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia. He contends that the silver and gold bullion mined in Mexico and Peru and shipped across oceans in galleons by the conquering Spanish preceded the convertible currencies and credit cards that now keep the world's economy ticking. NGOs like Human Rights Watch, defending the rights of Latino or Chinese workers, are upholding, Chanda says, the humanistic tradition...
...MUTUAL FUNDS Actively managed gold funds invest in the stocks of gold-mining companies, so the same considerations apply. A more direct approach is to invest in an exchange-traded fund that owns gold bullion. There are two: StreetTracks Gold Shares and iShares Comex Gold Trust...