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By Bruno COLMANT, Ph.D., CFA, Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium
Every year, as summer reaches its height, my thoughts return to the end of the Bretton Woods system. I was ten years old, and I still remember the exact stretch of road my father was driving along when the news came over the radio. I have often wondered whether my vocation as an economist was born in that instant. We never really know which distant impressions shape us, nor why certain events, heard almost by accident in childhood, remain lodged in memory for a lifetime.
The world of August 1971 now seems almost unreal. Richard Nixon was President of the United States, Georges Pompidou was President of France, Leonid Brezhnev led the Soviet Union, and Nixon's historic...
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