The Nixon Shock is easy and fun to point at because (A) it's Nixon (B) it's goldbugging (C) it led to a bunch of overreaching government intervention so of course it's the Original Sin of Economics. Fundamentally there was a trade imbalance between the country that won WWII and the countries it rebuilt because they started doing well enough that they got sick of being dictated to economically.

Scrapping the key trade deal for the Western World was never going to go smoothly and it was certainly an event but there's plenty of blame to share around as far as the decline of Western civilization.

Personally my money's on Coco - with her death, her mostly olfactory influence on the moneyed class was gone, and they were free to run wild and oppress future proletariat and petit bourgeoisie alike for generations to come.

I like it. Continuing a theme, 1971 was the year the world's biggest party was thrown and once the glitterati had it out of their systems they could get on with crushing the throats of the proletariat.