Monetary policy as we have seen started as a form of standardisation: ‘this amount of paper is worth this much shiny metal and always will be’ was the main linguistic directive of any monetary policymaker. Wider participation in the political decision-making process and a broader understanding of the problems caused by excessive business cycle volatility, particularly from the middle of the twentieth century, increased the onus on monetary policymaking to go further than merely setting standards. The move from a commodity currency to the fixed-but-adjustable exchange rate system of Bretton Woods, under which leading nations pegged their currency to the US dollar, may superficially not seem very important. Because, rather than fixing domestic currency value in terms of a block of shiny metal, it was now fixed in terms of some other reference currency, in this case the US dollar, which was itself fixed to the same shiny metal. However, a small advantage had been gained, we might say later that it was misused, but advantage there was; it was that the value of domestic currency could be changed relative to the reference currency and the domestic guardian of monetary standard could now also set the price of his or her currency externally to reflect and support adjustment to changing domestic conditions.