What was the name of the monetary system that fixed exchange rates to the US dollar from 1944 to 1971?

The Bretton Woods system was the monetary system that fixed exchange rates to the U.S. dollar from the postwar era until its collapse in the early 1970s.

Negotiated at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire, the system linked participating currencies to the dollar within agreed bands. The dollar itself was convertible into gold for foreign governments and central banks at $35 per troy ounce. This made the dollar the system’s central reserve currency while avoiding a return to the rigid prewar gold standard.

The agreement also created the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, now associated with the World Bank. These institutions were intended to support monetary cooperation, reconstruction, and balance-of-payments stability.

President Richard Nixon suspended dollar convertibility into gold on August 15, 1971. That decision, known as the Nixon Shock, effectively ended Bretton Woods, although the transition to floating exchange rates unfolded through later negotiations. The Plaza Accord was a much later 1985 effort to influence exchange rates, not the postwar monetary system.