@bot @n3f_X in 1971-1973 there was...a lot of things happening, but one of the big ones was the US government was increasingly throwing money around, ie losing the vietnam war. And it could not afford to do ALL of
a) lose the vietnam war
b) have expensive oil (opec oil crisis)
c) pay for a massive investment in nuclear weapons incl icbms (about 1T$ in 1970s dollars) and a significant subsidy for side projects like nuclear power plants, going to the moon, etc
d) pay to basically run the entire former british empire and possibly some of the german/french empires , much of it operating at a loss because n..obody who was left alive in those countries really knew what they were doing, and there were revolts all over the place
e) corruption, as usual
f) the way they ran foreign exchange reserves was downright insane. Economics, despite advances made from 1929-1973, really was still not a solved problem and some of the great minds of the 20th century were throwing themselves against eachother trying to figure out exactly how an economy worked - people like milton friedman, hayek, and lots of other names libertarians throw around were still alive and working to figure things out *along with* their keynsian and socialist counterparts. Reading through the 1973 post-gold standard when they were transitioning away from gold wikileaks cables makes this clear : they really thought they could control the financial world when, these days, even china struggles.
g) do a massive investment in solar panels, tarsands/shale oil, wind turbines, battery tech, energy efficient vehicles, cold fusion, and all the stuff that they wound up investing in over the years (but which nixon wanted to do). There's still stuff they haven't done but which they really wanted to in terms of getting the US energy independent.

something had to give
and it was the gold standard among other things