3.1The primary texts, and a limit on quotation
Three primary texts are read. The first is the President's radio and television address of 15 August 1971, as printed in the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents for 23 August 1971 (Nixon 1971). The text available for this study is a machine reading of a scan of that printed issue, in three excerpts: the opening, through the statement of the three targets; the passage on the temporary character of the wage and price freeze; and the passage on the dollar, from the third element of the programme to the closing claim that the actions form the most comprehensive economic policy in a long time. The parts of the address on jobs and taxes are not among the excerpts. The second text is the transcript of Paul A. Volcker's press conference of Saturday 6 October 1979, held in the Board Room of the Federal Reserve Building in Washington (Volcker 1979a). The third is his statement before the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress on 17 October 1979 (Volcker 1979b). Both of the latter are transcripts published by the Board of Governors and digitised by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
All three texts reach this study as uncorrected machine readings: the Volcker transcripts keep misread characters and page stamps, and the address, though its reading is clean, has not been checked against the page images. The study's rules forbid quoting a source whose text is uncorrected machine reading, so that a misread word is never put into an actor's mouth. They make one exception: two passages of the address, listed in advance, may be quoted exactly, and any clause of the first. This article quotes those two passages and nothing else from the primary texts. Everything else the three texts say is given in this article's own words, closely and in the texts' order, without quotation marks. A reader will meet the actors' sentences mostly at one remove; where the wording itself matters, this article says what the wording does without reproducing it. The readings of the three texts, and the links drawn between them and the secondary works, are this article's own unless a work is named as making the point.
3.2The records
Each day also has a record on Skeptron, a studio of the RISCON family that publishes questions about the past drawn from public sources. A Skeptron history case gives a dated event, a short scenario, and five questions with Skeptron's answers: the date of the record, a concrete fact, the boundary of what can be judged, a calendar check, and the condition of a later comparison. The record of 1971, The Closing of the Gold Window, is titled by Skeptron "Nixon's announcement of the stoppage of the dollar's gold convertibility"; it is dated as of 13 September 2026 and names one source, a Federal Reserve History essay on the end of gold convertibility. The record of 1979, Volcker's Saturday, is titled "Volcker's Saturday announcement and reserves-centered operations"; it is dated as of 14 September 2026 and names a Federal Reserve History essay on Volcker's anti-inflation measures. Both are written in Korean; this article quotes the English translation made once for Meridian's study, in whole sentences.
These records are modern summaries, written in 2026 for a public platform from modern essays. They are not archival documents, not contemporary with the events, and not synthetic scenes: they are compressed readings of public histories. Each also carries sentences that Skeptron repeats across many cases with only names and dates changed, such as the instruction not to merge announcement, decision, implementation and result into one event; those are the studio's method and are not read as findings. The fourth question of each case, a weekday check by calendar arithmetic, says nothing about the event and is not used.
3.3The ledger
The two records belong to a set of eighty-four Skeptron cases that Meridian's study of emergency acts in money and credit coded on the same axes, twenty-four of them read closely. In plain words: each record was read twice, independently, by one model run twice, and each reading answered fixed questions about the record's own sentences, with the studio's repeated sentences set aside. The study's own questions, registered on 6 October 2026 before any case was coded for them, ask whether the record shows an act by an authority and of what kind; whether the act is presented as temporary or for a term; whether a condition, date or event of its end is named; what became of it; whether two different dated moments are given; whether a figure is set apart from what was available; and who bore the cost. Where the two readings agree, the answer counts as settled; where they differ, as unclear. Five hypotheses, F1 to F5, were registered with the questions.
The ledger reads the records, not the primary texts: it shows what a reader of the modern summary is told. That gap is part of this article's subject. The ledger figures used are gathered in the Appendix.