the dollar i mean is it slowly eroding people we've talked about for years about the end of the bretton woods agreement i mean you know where is the dollar going is that just slowly slipping away. i think that's a better characterization since we're supposed to be debating that than martins' slowly the trading doesn't really matter that much to me because the un is dead as a global currency it's since it's been undervalued we haven't seen that the want of course has potential as a global currency but the lack of nerve in beijing is holding that back and the u.s. is doing its best to undermine the dollar but at the same time everybody else is currencies are so weak or stunted that we see any as again in the euro crisis money flowing into dollar holdings so american policy i think martin and i certainly agree on that is damaging to the dollar but i think the decline is very slow because everything is relative it's not just your currency it's how your currency looks against other currencies and in that sense the dollar's doing ok and what do you think about that market is there none of the curre

chance beyond this point and this was welcome credit to them with no turning back was it the end of bretton woods was it even further back the creation of the federal reserve or even before that and around the civil war era when the national banking system was established towards that end of civil war. all good points but i would say the beginning of the end was world war one because in world war one nine hundred fourteen all the european countries went off the gold standard because they didn't have enough gold to fight the war and they started issuing a lot of paper money and government to fight the war and all of the debt and paper money led to a worldwide credit bubble that we call the roaring twenty's but in one nine hundred thirty the credit couldn't be repaid in the depression started but also all those governments spent so much money during the war that it was government directed and government driven and the government controlled the economy completely and the same thing happened again in world war two before world war one the government spent three percent of g.d.p. by the one nine hundr

the mechanics of it could be quite complicated if we go back to the system that we had called bretton woodsfrom the end of the second world war through. to the great inflation in america in the one nine hundred seventy s. what happened was the dollar was pegged to gold the magic price was thirty five dollars an ounce and all the other currencies in the system were pegged to the dollar. and that was fine as long as america pursued stability oriented policies but then it fell apart when america tried to finance the great society at home and the vietnamese war brought an increased spending on sustainably so i think what would happen if they did try and implemented is that you would see other currencies around the world fix to the dollar and the dollar fixed at some level to gold current market price sayas to what would happen after that i think is is is is very unclear because if you had people turning up at the federal reserve window in washington saying please i'd like some gold for my greenbacks they'd soon run i also for gold because they don't have enough gold and there's enough gold in t

he presided over america's role in fostering the united nations in the bretton woods agreement. he was the president under containment which saved western europe from soviet russian bolshevism that was poised with 1.3 million troops. he fostered the marshall plan, he brought the national security act that created the defense department and the cia and other things. he successfully made a transition from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy x he made the momentous decision to read about how he made that decision when all of his advisers said you can't save berlin, you're going to have to give up on berlin, and he made the decision for the berlin airlift. absolutely heroic. all that i just described happened in his first term. his second term was quite mediocre. he didn't manage to maintain what i call longevity of success which is a frothy record a frothy performance through eight full years or whatever time you have. he had a couple of notable achievements, nato was in his second term. the korean war under macarthur was in the second term, but he had a sputtering economy, on