Haha I mean, the Nixon Shock was no joke. I will often tell people 'You remember how in Goldfinger the fat dude had this plan to nuke all the gold in Fort Knox and make it worthless and therefore cause massive inflation and the rise in value of his own gold? Yeah Nixon pretty much did that' and that's usually where they go 'wtf why don't we learn this in school' and I say 'because the more recently it happened the more people argue about it and you're always running late so frankly your teachers' lesson plans end at V-J day and they never expect to get there anyway'. But the Nixon Shock was only one thing that fucked shit up for the Golden Age of Capitalism. You could just as easily - and with more credibility - point to other things. Fundamentally, 1945-1973 was built on free fucking energy. The United States built gobsmacking amounts of hydro power because they had a jobs program and that allowed us to refine aluminum so cheaply that we could make cans out of it. That in turn allowed us to chase Germany back across the Rhine and ass England entirely out of the Middle East which allowed us to get oil pretty much for asking for it. We then established a Jewish state the one place without much oil and all the other oil states got pissed and then when they tried to snuff out that Jewish state they decided everyone who backed it didn't get any oil THE END. The Nixon Shock had the effect of making all economies competitive, to be sure, and there were winners and losers, but the Nixon Shock wouldn't have kept Egypt out of the Sinai.
The Nixon Shock is easy and fun to point at because (A) it's Nixon (B) it's goldbugging (C) it led to a bunch of overreaching government intervention so of course it's the Original Sin of Economics. Fundamentally there was a trade imbalance between the country that won WWII and the countries it rebuilt because they started doing well enough that they got sick of being dictated to economically. Scrapping the key trade deal for the Western World was never going to go smoothly and it was certainly an event but there's plenty of blame to share around as far as the decline of Western civilization. I like it. Continuing a theme, 1971 was the year the world's biggest party was thrown and once the glitterati had it out of their systems they could get on with crushing the throats of the proletariat.Personally my money's on Coco - with her death, her mostly olfactory influence on the moneyed class was gone, and they were free to run wild and oppress future proletariat and petit bourgeoisie alike for generations to come.