The failure to realign currency values in the face of fundamental economic change spelled the beginning of the end for the gold exchange standard of the Bretton Woods agreement. By the late 1960s the foreign dollar liabilities of the United States were much larger than the US gold stock. The pressures of this “dollar glut” finally culminated in August 1971, when President Nixon declared the dollar to be inconvertible and provided a close to the Bretton Woods era of fixed exchange rates and convertible currencies.