oh! I thought it was that France announced that it was going to

In any case, Nixon was in kind of an impossible situation. We tend to blame this stage on him, but suspending the convertibility was kind of the natural next step given the gold to dollars ratio by then.

It still boggles my mind that we already had years (decades?) where American citizens couldn't convert *their* dollars for gold, but foreign governments could. It seems like either it's convertible or it's not; either you have that gold or you don't.