The recent Group of 20 (G-20) meeting in Washington, DC is where the world's 20 biggest and/or most important economies got together to change the world's economic architecture, with everybody promising to spend like maniacs right now, but to one day act honorably and adhere to some future agreement that really isn't worth the paper it will be written on.
The problem is that since 1944 the United States had promised to act responsibly and hold the value of the dollar constant, controlling the money supply, and thus preventing inflation and runaway booms like the gold standard did, so that all the other countries could take the easy way out and merely use the dollar as their "gold" reserves against which they could value their own
currencies, instead of hassling with all that metal back and forth.
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