Themes from the 70s
6: An End to Certainty
Post-war prosperity had rested on a fragile network of economic assumptions - cheap energy, a sound dollar and a free world trading system. President Nixon's measures of 1971 dramatised the fact that the us could no longer provide the world with a gold-backed currency and that the us's national interest came before anything else.
With worldwide inflation rooted in the flood of dollars and the vast increase in oil prices, it was a decade when old certainties were shattered and when new ones remained to be constructed. Presented by Peter Hobdav Producer WILL HUTTON