France: The Golden Fleece

General de Gaulle continued his assault on the dollar. Since no nation rushed to embrace De Gaulle's earlier proposals that the world return to the gold standard, French Finance Minister Valery Giscard d'Estaing last week announced that France would go back to gold all by itself. Beginning immediately, said Giscard, France will settle all its foreign deficits by paying in gold—a fairly painless move in view of the fact that France has no deficits. More ominously for the U.S. and Britain, he called on the West's major nations to make "a solemn...

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