The Development of Foreign Exchange Trading and the World Market
Saturday, 6. November 2010 5:21
Till World War I it was always theoretically possible to go to the central bank and ask for gold or silver in the place of your bank notes. Of course, this very barely happened in significant amounts and many state banks stopped keeping enough gold to cover. Now and then such as in Germany after World War I, there would be a catastrophic run on the banks, leading to crazy inflation and the breakdown of the national economy.
To prevent an analogous disaster going down in a defenseless nation again, the Bretton Woods agreement was drawn up in 1944. This ‘permanently’ pegged all national currencies to the US dollar, and fixed the value of the dollar against gold at $35 per oz. Round the same time, the global monetary Fund and World Bank were created to help in maintaining world economic stability. This held till the early 1970s. But states were developing at different rates and in different directions, and in 1971 President Nixon postponed the gold standard. Banks had to exchange money to provide their clients with foreign currencies for travel and importing goods, but pretty shortly they were exchanging far more than they wanted to profit from the continuous rise and fall in the values of the different currencies. The development of the web meant the market became accessible to anybody, in theory. To accommodate the massive numbers of potential new clients and because their costs were dropping, brokers started reducing the minimum investment amount.
Category:Forex | Comment (0) | Autor: Mudrica
