Nixon eliminated what remained of the gold and silver standard finishing FDR's work. Once the FED could just print money they were able to manipulate the market which brought about a shit ton of growth while the dollar's value dropped. Now we have a dollar worth a small fraction of what it was worth before but we are comparing apples and oranges now because fiat money is not the same as gold and silver backed money.

So what happened in 1971 is this...

The US dollar stopped existing.

It was replaced with fiat money that had the same name and same dead Presidents printed on it.

Also Nixon started opening up the US market to China and they took advantage of this new financial world order.