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Entry 217 of 240Reform

Bretton Woods and the Postwar Order

1944 CE/North America/The Allied powers
Today New Hampshire, USA (and the institutions it founded)Span Bretton Woods system · 1944–1971

With the war still on, delegates from forty-four nations met at a New Hampshire hotel and designed the postwar economy: currencies pegged to a dollar backed by gold, plus the institutions that became the IMF and World Bank. The aim was explicit — avoid repeating the 1930s, when collapsing trade and beggar-thy-neighbour devaluation had fed the rise of dictators. The United Nations followed a year later. It was an attempt to engineer, in advance, against the patterns that had just destroyed the world.

◆ Worth knowingKeynes argued for a global currency he called the bancor, issued by no country. He lost to the American plan, and the dollar became the world's reserve currency — a defeat economists still argue about eighty years later.
◆ The mechanismState formation & institutional founding

A durable new order — a state, an institution, a system of rule — is deliberately built and consolidated, outlasting the people who founded it.

Also: Debt / credit cycle · Trade-route shift · Monetary debasement

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