Willem van de Velde the Younger, Dutch ships in a calm. Public domain.
At Bretton Woods in 1944, the allied governments agreed to peg currencies to the dollar and to create a fund and a bank for the rebuilding of trade.
A stretched household saw no check from the conference, and its grocery bill was still set by wartime controls.
A household with savings in dollars was holding the currency other governments would use to price trade, which mattered more in later years than it did that July.
A bank, an exporter, or a firm that lent abroad gained a system in which other countries held dollars, and a foreign treasury that needed dollars had to mind the peg.
The Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund committed members to fixed exchange rates, with the dollar convertible to gold for foreign governments, not for an American family at a shop counter.
Private gold hoarding was already illegal at home.
What a household received was indirect and real: a plan to rebuild trade with the American wage at its center, and rules meant to stop the competitive currency cuts of the 1930s.
Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund (1944)