- He took the United States off the gold standard.
- He established wage and price controls administered by the federal government.
Nixon made two major economic moves. First, he attacked inflation by ordering a ninety-day freeze on wages and prices, after which he set up wage and price guidelines that would be administered by a federal price board. Wage and price controls were generally popular, but they poisoned Nixon's relations with the labor movement. Further, though they curbed inflation temporarily, prices skyrocketed again soon after. Nixon's other initiative was to take the United States off the gold standard, decoupling the dollar from the value of gold and thereby dismantling the Bretton Woods system that had regulated the currencies of industrial nations since the end of World War II. This strategy lowered the value of the dollar, which Nixon hoped would reverse the trade deficit, but it also created a volatile international currency market. Throughout his presidency. Nixon struggled to tame the economy, wavering between spending and cutting and toggling between lowering interest rates to spur growth and raising them to check inflation.