Standing at the International Monetary Fund, the institution built to manage the world’s money after the dollar was placed at its center. A little history most of us never learned in school: In November 1910, a small group of bankers and a U.S. Senator slipped away to a private club on Jekyll Island, Georgia, under false names. Senator Nelson Aldrich, Paul Warburg, Frank Vanderlip and a few others drafted the plan that became the Federal Reserve in 1913. This is the moment control of American money moved from the people’s representatives to private banking interests. Thirty-one years later, in July 1944, delegates from 44 nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and created the IMF and the World Bank. The new system pegged world currencies to the dollar, and the dollar to gold at a fixed price per ounce. For a while, money was still anchored to something real. Then on August 15, 1971, President Nixon closed the gold window. The last link between the dollar and gold was cut, and...