The controls imposed by President Nixon on August 15,1971 are sometimes referred to as the nation's first peacetime controls. But this statement (which, incidentally, ignores the Revolutionary War experiments) is true only in a legal sense. Undeclared war still raged in Vietnam; the treaty was not signed until January 1973, some 17 months later. From an economic point of view these were wartime controls designed to stem an inflation that had its origins in expenditures for war and the attempt to finance those expenditures through the creation of money. By the summer of 1971 the economy appeared, from the perspective of the times, to be deeply troubled. The rate of unemployment was close to 6 percent, up sharply from the levels reached in the late 1960s. This was partly the result of a tight money policy imposed by the Federal Reserve in 1969, which in turn was a response to the high rates of growth in the money supply and the large deficits run up in 1967 and 1968. The rate of inflation had responded to tight money: The consumer price index, which had risen 6.1 percent in 1969 and 5.5 percent in 1970, rose at an annual rate of only 3.6 percent in the first eight months of 1971.