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Under the Bretton Woods system, international trade grew, but this success masked an underlying flaw in the system's design. There was no mechanism for increasing the supply of international reserves to support continued growth in trade. In the late 1950s and early 1960s52 central banks worldwide needed more dollars to hold as reserves but were unable to expand their money supplies, as that meant exceeding their dollar reserves and threatening their exchange rate pegs. For the system to be successful, the United States needed to run dollar deficits. As a consequence, the value of the dollar began exceeding its gold backing.

During the early 1960s, investors could sell gold at a higher price in London than the stated rate of $35 per ounce in the United States, indicating that the dollar was overvalued. In 1960, Belgian-American economist Robert Triffin defined this problem, which came to be known as the Triffin dilemma, whereby a country's economic interests conflict with its international objectives as the custodian of the world's reserve currency.53 This means that the United States couldn't provide the world with a reserve currency while at the same time doing what is best for the country's economy; it had to choose one policy to follow at the expense of the other.

France voiced concerns over the artificially low price of gold in 1968 and even called for a return to the former gold standard. Around this same time, excess dollars flowed into international markets as the United States expanded its money supply to accommodate the costs of its military campaign in the Vietnam War. Speculators began attacking the dollar to exploit this weakness.

In August 1971, President Richard Nixon suspended the exchange of dollars for gold. The suspension of convertibility effectively shifted the adjustment burdens of a devalued dollar to the rest of the world. Speculators moved on to attacking other currencies and began selling dollars in anticipation of these currencies being revalued against the dollar. Central banks were faced with choosing between inflating money supplies, imposing capital controls, or floating exchange rates.54