World currency pound sterling. The transition between pound sterling and United States dollar and its impact for central banks was described recently. In the period following the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, exchange rates around the world were pegged to the United States dollar, which could be exchanged for a fixed amount of gold. This reinforced the dominance of the US dollar as a global currency. Since the collapse of the fixed exchange rate regime and the gold standard and the institution of floating exchange rates following the Smithsonian Agreement in 1971, most currencies around the world have no longer been pegged
Currency War of 2009–11 dollar float freely. While the US has taken no direct action to devalue its currency, there is close to universal consensus among analysts that its quantitative easing programmes exert downwards pressure on the dollar. According to many analysts the currency war had largely fizzled out by mid-2011, though others including Mantega disagreed. As of March 2012, outbreaks of rhetoric were still occurring, with additional measures being adopted by countries like Brazil to control the appreciation of their currency. Yet by June, there were signs that currency misalignment had been levelling out in China and across the world, with even Mantega