If monetary stability had reigned throughout in the US there would have been no impetus to monetary union in Europe at least in its modern gargantuan form. Each country there might well have adhered individually to an international US dollar standard. . . .
Instead the inflationary path taken by the Martin and Burns Federal Reserves fanned direct US monetary conflict with Germany where monetarist titans had assumed power in the Deutsche Bundesbank. Eventually Germany ‘broke free’ from the deeply flawed worldwide dollar standard often described as ‘the Bretton Woods system’, floating the Deutsche mark in May 1971. The calculation in Frankfurt and Bonn was that that the gains for the German economy from domestic monetary stability now possible would more than match the losses from exchange rate instability. Even so there was considerable concern about those possible losses.
—Brendan Brown, Euro Crash: How Asset Price Inflation Destroys the Wealth of Nations, 3rd ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 210.
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