Three Days at Camp David

How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy

By: Jeffrey E. Garten

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

The former dean of the Yale School of Management and undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration chronicles the 1971 August meeting at Camp David, where President Nixon unilaterally ended the last vestiges of the gold standard - breaking the link between gold and the dollar - transforming the entire global monetary system.

Over the course of three days - from August 13 to 15, 1971 - at a secret meeting at Camp David, President Richard Nixon and his brain trust changed the course of history. Before that weekend, all national currencies were valued to the US dollar, which was convertible to gold at a fixed rate. That system, established by the Bretton Woods Agreement at the end of World War II, was the foundation of the international monetary system that helped fuel the greatest expansion of middle-class prosperity the world has ever seen.

In making his decision, Nixon shocked world leaders, bankers, investors, traders, and everyone involved in global finance. Jeffrey E. Garten argues that many of the roots of America’s dramatic retrenchment in world affairs began with that momentous event that was an admission that America could no longer afford to uphold the global monetary system. It opened the way for massive market instability and speculation that has plagued the world economy ever since, but at the same time it made possible the gigantic expansion of trade and investment across borders that created our modern era of once unimaginable progress.

Based on extensive historical research and interviews with several participants at Camp David, and informed by Garten’s own insights from positions in four presidential administrations and on Wall Street, Three Days at Camp David chronicles this critical turning point, analyzes its impact on the American economy and world markets, and explores its ramifications now and for the future.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Jeffrey E. Garten (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers

Sticks to its knitting, thoroughly and well

I think the author fulfilled his ambition, to walk a line between ideas, history and people. The focus on a compressed time, then pulling back to see a larger stage, works. Just out of my financial interest, I wish things were allocated a bit more toward his investment banker side, with slightly less to inside political baseball, but it is his book, not mine. There is surely merit in walking through this sausage-making process, particularly as this was a colloquium of brilliant participants on one weekend, not the interminable slogging and posturing of something like a Dodd-Frank or an Obamacare, grinding through Congress. This was an amazing team of very gifted members! I could only wish we could find such groupings now, in a Washington often descending into tragic farce in a micro-news cycle and a climate of hysteria. (We do owe something of that to the Watergate era, but that is another book.) Also, the "better Nixon" is on display here, the one who accomplished admirable things (assuming you can agree with his pragmatism here, which is amply discussed and contextualized). I would also have liked more of the author's epilogue and context, given quickly and sharply at the end. But this, too, is a success. There is bright explanation here, at a layperson level, sober and smart if not the most entertaining prose.

Three Days at Camp David

Great book. Very thorough. Great profiles of all of the main characters who were involved. One of the best books about Nixon I have read.

History Exposed

Interesting historic account of how political calculations nurture bad policy. Escaping the gold standard was necessary, the US Treasury could no longer afford to exchange thirty-five US dollars for 1 ounce of gold. But to act by executive fiat, without consulting allies, without including Congressional leaders, to avoid limiting Big Government produced a decade of stagflation.

After the Trump and Biden administrations have made similar political calculations, early warnings of stagflation have increased. Pre-revolutionary French politicians never understood how money and finances worked; the aristocracy blithely bankrupted itself, believing the bill would never come due. 21st century American politicians display even less understanding of economics. ~