There was a world-wide change in 1914 that blew apart the previous rigid system of currency exchange. The U.S. followed suit, but under any scheme at all the exchange rates of its currency would have been more unstable because the previous stability between all currencies was gone, whatever the U.S. chose.

Nixon renounced conversion to go to a fiat system. That's what renouncing conversion means, to abandon conversion, leaving only the fiat. You are agreeing strenuously.

And again, all this a whole other topic than whether downturns were more or less frequent: which was where I started.

The world wide change in 1914 was going from the gold standard to a fiat money system.

> exchange rates of currency

That was not the topic, the topic was instability in the money supply.

> Nixon

The US official exchange rate was a fiction from 1930-Nixon, because it was illegal to hold gold as a monetary instrument. Nixon simply did away with the fiction.

NO. Just before the war, the war scare blew up the exchange system. It's in the book cited. History. Empiricism. Data.

Now you want to change the topic away from EITHER economic stability OR exchange rate stability? To money supply stability, a whole other topic? Yikes.

Nixon - cavilling. Choose any illustration and the logic and semantics of "fiat" remain. Once again, you're off on a new topic, a new distraction. Not only is that not logical, it's not civil, either.