Abstract

Two changes of monetary regime in the United States were announced while markets were shut: President Nixon's address of Sunday 15 August 1971, which suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold, and the Federal Reserve's package of Saturday 6 October 1979, which moved open market operations from the federal funds rate to the supply of bank reserves. The scholarship on each argues about motive and mechanism. On 1971, a domestic-politics account (Gowa 1983) stands beside institutional histories of a system shaped by repeated crises and great-power interests (James 1996; Eichengreen 1996). On 1979, a documentary account of a procedure that permitted wider swings in rates and signalled commitment (Lindsey, Orphanides and Rasche 2005) stands beside a biography that puts the chairman's persistence at the centre (Silber 2012). Behind both lies the quarrel between rules and discretion. This article asks a narrower question of the announcements themselves: did they write down what would be looked at again, and on what condition the act would end? It reads the address of 1971, Paul Volcker's press conference of 6 October 1979 and his statement to the Joint Economic Committee of 17 October 1979, beside the modern summaries that Skeptron, a public history platform, keeps of the same days. The address gave a condition of ending to its import tax and none to the suspension, placing the matter to be reviewed in the conduct of other nations; the texts of 1979 named the measures to be watched and declined to name an end for the procedure. The modern records keep the dates and drop most of this. Neither finding settles the debates over motive; both locate what each announcement left open.