Simply... how Bretton Woods reordered the world

The Bretton Woods Conference

In July 1944, as World War Two was drawing to a close, the world's leading politicians mostly from Northern countries - gathered to set forth notions of how to reorganize the world economy. For the first time in human history almost universal institutions - the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) - were established to solve global economic problems. The common view at the Conference was that the depression of the 1930s and the rise of fascism could be traced to the collapse of international trade and isolationist economic policies. The Conference rejected proposals by the eminent British economist John Maynard Keynes that would have established a world reserve currency administered by a central bank and created a more stable and fair world economy by automatically recycling trade surpluses to finance trade deficits. Keynes' notion did not fit the interests of a US eager to take on the role of the world's economic powerhouse. Instead the Conference opted for a system based on the free movement of capital and goods with the US dollar as the international currency. The Fund and the Bank were limited to managing problems related to deficits and to currency and capital shortages.

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