Not to mention the eradication of the last radical elements of the labor movement and the murder of civil rights leaders.
"In August 1971, French president Pompidou sent a battleship to New York harbor to remove France’s gold from the vault of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and to transport it to the Banque de France in Paris. Soon thereafter, gold accounted for 92 percent of French reserves.
On August 11, the British requested that the Treasury remove the $3 billion of gold from the U.S. depository of Fort Knox to the New York Federal Reserve vault, where the gold of foreign governments was stored.
As Paul Volcker, who was then treasury undersecretary for monetary affairs, put it: “If the British, who had founded the system with us, and who had fought so hard to defend their own currency, were going to take gold for their dollars, it was clear the game was indeed over.”
When Nixon spoke on August 15, 1971, the U.S. held less than 10,000 tons of gold, less than half of what it once had."
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3545&context=faculty_scholarship
See, that’s the kind of iffy story I’m talking about. The French navy held no battleships in inventory and had retired them all after WWII.
Here’s a link to a definitely not stolen from Archive copy of the book they cited
I can’t find anything about it in there.
This forum post about it seems to think that it was a mis-identification of the ship by a NYT journalist. Probably a cruiser or some other armed ship.
Would be weird to load billions of dollars worth of gold onto an unarmed ship…
Probably routine, but they definitely withdrew gold and Pompidou was absolutely mocking America, probably sent a DeGrasse cruiser to pick it up.
Photo I can understand the mistake. Especially for someone not intimately familiar with ships. Anything big with guns is a battleship lol.
