Thanks to an admission by former Treasury Secretary John Connally, made nearly 17 years after Nixon moved to break the Bretton Woods system, we know that the real perpetrators were not the former Texas Governor, but global operators George Shultz and Paul Volcker.  Their manipulation of Connally and Nixon launched the world financial system toward its present demise, by downgrading the power of sovereign governments to invest in the physical economy.  Instead, increasing power was put into the hands of central bankers, who today are running a disintegrating casino economy, based on floating exchange rates.  The “inside story” of how this happened confirmed Lyndon LaRouche’s late 1960s forecast of an intention to impose Schachtian/fascist austerity regimes, while turning productive industrial and agricultural centers into decaying rust heaps.  
For more on this, watch “So, Are You Finally Ready to Learn Economics” at the LaRouche Legacy Foundation website.