What caused the Post War Boom ?

In this video I describe the cause of the Post WWII prosperity.

I'll go ahead and make it simple right now. It isn't tax rates or labor unions. That is just silly.

[RBB]

You know, I was born in 1951 in Texas.  I remember the 50's and 60's very well.  I was brought in Agriculture.  In 1969 I had to leave home and got to work.  In the beginning, I didn't notice the economy at all.  By 1971 I had my own business.  But I noticed in 1973 that everything began to go CRAZY.  Fuel DOUBLED overnight.  The cost of everything I bought went up in Costs but my FEES I could NOT raise.  As the decade went along all kinds of things occurred that had never happened in MY lie time or even in my parents life time.  That is when I got INTERESTED in Economics.  At the same time, sine 1973 the big topic is always "The Economy".  We must "jumpstart" the economy, we must do this and must to that for the economy.  But it is never "Fixed".  Only Bubbles and Crashes, Bubbles and Crashes.  All I know for SURE is the "Economy" for ME has NOT been good in my adult life.  There has been NO PERIOD of Prosperity in my ADULT LIFE.  I went to college THREE times, it did no good.  I cannot learn an occupation as FAST and the Government and the "Economy" can RUIN THEM.  I am old now and poor and have no health insurance, and I am DISABLED but I am not eligible for "disability" retirement..  When are my "good years" going to come??  When am I going to make enough money to have a home and family and all of these other things that other people take for granted?? All of my ADULT life we have been in a CONSTANT STATE of STAGFLATION of one degree to another since 1973.  What few "Boom Years" there were were PHONY, they were result of the Savings and Loan Lootfest of the 80's and then the LOOTING of the ENTIRE system in the 2000's.  For whatever the reason, it has ruined my life.  I blame it MORE on Keynesian Economics more than anything ELSE.  Its not the ONLY reason, but it is the ROOT of all the evil in it.

I have suspicioned for a LONG time that Nixon pulled us out of Bretton Woods, because we had LITTLE GOLD LEFT.  I can cite a LOT of reasons it is the way it is, but Bretton Woods was just ONE event.  There are OTHERS that played a larger role.  For example Australia has not run all over the world Sticking its NOSE in to other countries BUSINESS, *does Australia have 800 Military bases all over the World??  Why hell no.*  There are MANY reasons this country is going down.  Crummy economic theory, lack of LEADERSHIP and neo-cons running all over the world trying to start some WAR so they can sell War Plane and Bombs etc.

We should go back to Classical Economics.  That served us wel  until we got in to a "Correction" and Keynes came along ans told Roosevelt he must "Spend yourself in to Prosperity."  I don't not like ANY Capitalistic system that will not POLICE itself from Fraud and Theft, or one that "requires" a Dictator / Guru to "tweak it his way" to make it "Work".

Its all too late for me.

So, NOW it is past the point of no return.  This thing is going DOWN, BB

[tigretony]

I have several questions.

1 Why didn't the Fed just keep buying gold at 35/oz so that it always kept 100% reserves? That way it would never need to adjust monetary policy no matter how many dollars other nations hold. Of course, that would also mean losing control of interest rates and monetary policy.

2 If that wasn't the case and the Fed did keep control of monetary policy, I guess that the system should have allowed for some range of deviations from the target price of gold. It would have been impossible for it to be always at 35/oz.

3 Why didn't the US monetary policy-induced recessions translate to other countries whose currencies were pegged? I understand that if you peg your currency to another, you lose control altogether of interest rates within your country. A monetary tightening in the US would have starved other countries of dollars and created pressure for devaluation. That is, unless they also tightened their own money supply.

4 A corollary to this last question. If what other nations did was build up reserves of US dollars during periods of monetary loosening and sell them during periods of monetary tightening, then I think this could have worked out in the short or medium term, but it was a disaster waiting to happen. All these fixed prices would have left no room for adjustment based on changing fundamentals. That plus no 100% reserves for gold, which underpinned the whole system and what surprises me is that the whole system did actually last as long as it did.

[raybarrera]

Please, please, please site your sources in the 'About' section.

[Kvothe]

oil prices changed because of the first oil crisis

[Trepur]

While the Breton-woods system was one of the causes of the post war boom, it was hardly the only. To blame a recession or a boom on one factor is naive. 

[raultejada]

can anyone recommend a few book's about the Breton wood's system, (obviously I will check out unsettled accounts) I did not think their could be any merit to having a gold standard because it felt like adding speculation on top of speculation, instead of adding a fixed price to a fiat currency. I still do not get it, gold is a commodity that has very few non luxury use's It seem's to have most of its value because people think its that valuable, and large amounts of gold and market power play's still mess with the price.

But, after seeing this video reading some articles and watching a few other's it seems that It really did have a huge impact on the global economy from my perspective it there are only three way's this could work.
1) it feel's like a massive global placebo effect.
2)Or the us was using this in a round about complicated way to deliberately move wealth around to other country in order to have them build long term infrastructure to create first world economic boom as part of the communism problem's however it became unsustainable, no longer beneficial to the US so they stopped.
or a combination of both. still I am an uneducated cretin with only a high school diploma so if you can recommend book's  that would be great also the more technical the better.