A. BADEL

During the Depression and World War II, gold increasingly flowed toward the United States, followed by the gradual rebuilding of European gold reserves in the postwar decades. As the Bretton Woods system matured, European reserves continued to rise while U.S. gold holdings steadily declined, reflecting mounting pressure on the dollar’s convertibility into gold. These diverging trends ultimately foreshadowed the suspension of dollar–gold convertibility in 1971 and the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary framework. Source: Chat GPT 4.0.