Abstract: Historically, moving from the gold standard, as a predominant self-ruling mechanism, towards all different types of payment systems, ranging to the final AI clearing central local networks, or multinational area agreements, with a world’s population in a progressive geometrical growth since last century trend, from one Tn to a 9 Tn world’s inhabitants, the planet shows a dramatic and generally unhappy experience.

Since the Vienna Congress in the year 1815, the original gold standard model has, self-ruled, resolving most of the international and local payments disparities, previously adopted and consolidated as a final universal overall standard almost worldwide, without national alternatives, as discussed by the Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations (EFO), presenting a report to the conference, which provided the first official articulation of the gold exchange standard. The second question case, at the end of last century’s twenty’ and middle thirty’s financial new deal’s disasters, consequence of the first World War, has been well raised and defined by Batchelder and Glasner, considering the pre-Keynesian Monetary Theories of the first Great Depression in their 2013 comment: “What Ever Happened to Hawtrey and Cassel”, which must be supposedly understood and read, as an anticipation of the article “What happened to Triffin And Rueff”, the last commentators of the ’44 WW2 monetary settlement in Bretton Woods. The last two predicted in 1960-1961 that the Bretton Woods system, a post World War II rekindling of the previous gold-exchange standard, flawed as it was by the same official reserve currency contagion of the 1920s, would soon groan, under the flood weight of excess American paper dollars issuance (Batchelder & Glasner, 2013).

The two other authors published, first Robert Triffin in 1961: “Gold and the Dollar Crisis: The Future of Convertibility” and Jacques Rueff in 1964, “The Age of Inflation”, stating their predictions of the convertibility. The general prediction of a collapse of local diverging adopted value mechanisms, started to indicate system collapsing as the famous first 301 C.E. Diocletian edict, then the continental dollar unit adopted in the American revolution fate, to the August 1914 July’s Stock Exchange closures at the start of the WW1. Finally, the second Keynesian prediction in the “Consequence of the peace” and the final similar, temporarily, removal gold conversion by President Nixon in 1971 Camp David, 15 August famous sentence (Triffin, 1961; Rueff, 1964).

The roaring twenties, was indeed a large historical expansion in the USA, with the birth of the DuPont (nylon), Procter & Gamble (Soap powder), Revlon (Cosmetics), RCA (radio), IBM (accounting machines), Alfred Sloan (General Motors) (automotive industries), large new corporations, representing the immediate effect of the monetary expansion enacted by president Coolidge, culminating with the gold confiscation in the following President Roosevelt era. The gold confiscation and the general monetary restrictions in the single areas, had depressing effects on the economies with large unemployment and worldwide recession down to the second WW.

The Bretton Woods provisions of July 1944, with the harshly criticized rewording because of the implementation in the text of the word gold, adding “US dollars”, as first line monetary base is “de facto” a worldwide reserve for all the coming adherents to the IMF, leading “de facto” to a temporarily dollar-gold merger, still in existence.

Key words: legal currencies, interstate banking clearings, monetary functions, community protection, economic integration

JEL codes: G28