Nixon, FedChair Arthur Burns, Treasury Secretary, Paul Volcker met secretly with Nixon at Camp David where Treasury Secretary John Connally convinced Nixon to break up the international economic arrangement that had existed for the previous twenty-five years [i.e. the so-called “Bretton Woods” system by suspending the convertibility of the dollar into gold, freezing wages and prices for 90 days to combat potential inflationary effects, and impose an import surcharge of 10%. Two days later Nixon issued Executive Order 11615. “Nobody’s in charge,” Volcker says. “The Europeans couldn’t live with the uncertainty and they’ll make their own currency.” The Bretton Woods system had made the United States the world’s banker, basically—it had established the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency fixed to gold, and it imposed conditions about no import quotas, and so on. When Nixon did it he was warned that it would make him a lot of powerful enemies—because multinational corporations and international banks relied on that system, and they did not like it be ing broken down. Nixon was being attacked in places like the Wall Street Journal.