The Plaza Accord? Yeah, the US depreciated the value of its own currency against a handful of its allies to inflate the value of assets outside the US to combat a growing trade deficit. Funnily enough, our allies asked us to do it first, and it took a few years before the US had any interest. It wasn’t until Reagan’s second term, with a trade deficit ballooning out of control from a constant appreciation of the USD, that the US finally agreed to intervene in financial markets. We basically agreed to devalue our own currency to adjust our trade deficit, which had the effect of causing the Japanese, French, and German economies to skyrocket in asset value as the exchange rate of their respective currencies plummeted.

Basically in the 80s America was still a manufacturing powerhouse and we really, really needed our currency to not be worth so much, so that people would still buy our stuff. Then NAFTA came along less than a decade later and shipped all the manufacturing jobs overseas anyway. Whoopsie-daisy, neoliberalism couldn’t see three inches in front of its own nose, again. Damn, wonder why that keeps happening?