The history of the Nixon Shock doesn't begin in 1971, it goes all the way back to 1792. As Keith wrote about in his article, Nixon's decision to close the gold window was the culmination of a long history of bad decisions. Decisions where government repeatedly and wrongly interfered in matters of money and credit, where each subsequent decision compounded the ill-effects of the previous one. In other words, the Nixon Shock is the not-so-grand-finale of a long and checkered history of the federal government messing with people's money.