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Following the Bretton Woods agreement most currencies (and especially the US dollar) were fixed against gold. President Nixon abandonned Bretton Woods in the early 1970's and after that most first world countries moved to floating exchange rates. Today very few small countries have pegged their currencies to the US dollar such as Cuba, Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon, Panama and Saudi Arabia. Pegging their currency to the US dollar gives their importers and exporters more certainty. For a long time the Chinese economy had its currency, the yuan, pegged to the US dollar at 8 yuan. This was maintained from 1995 to 2005, but that has been steadily adjusted in more recent times.

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