Bretton Woods

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order

by Benn Steil  · 14 May 2013  · 710pp  · 164,527 words

White: the facund, servant-reared scion of Cambridge academics, and the brash, dogged technocrat raised in working-class Boston by Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. Keynes at Bretton Woods was the first-ever international celebrity economist. The American media could not get enough of the barbed, eloquent Englishman, who was both revered and reviled

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White spat out in one particularly heated session, “to produce something which Your Highness can understand.”7 White’s role as the chief architect of Bretton Woods, where he outmaneuvered his far more brilliant but willfully ingenuous British counterpart, marks him as an unrelenting nationalist, seeking to extract every advantage out of

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for conferencing, far from the oppressive summer heat and busy wartime gloominess of Washington. Yet whereas better-known coastal spots might have done as nicely, Bretton Woods offered an attractive political amenity. It was to be found in a state whose Republican senator, Charles Tobey, a redoubtable opponent of international organizations, faced

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international unit.”73 Congress would never accept this. Unitas was now dead. But Keynes made one suggestion that ultimately passed muster in Washington and at Bretton Woods. After White rejected the idea of calling the Stabilization Fund the “International Monetary Union,” arguing that Congress would hate the word “Union,” Keynes offered “International

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be three stages: the preconference drafting committee meetings in mid-June, to be held in Atlantic City; an enormous multiweek conference starting July 1 at Bretton Woods; and a postconference ratification process in all participating countries’ legislatures. This was hardly the model that Keynes envisioned, which was to be a tightly controlled

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, wherever that is, waiting for us,” Morgenthau announced, ending the meeting.140 “The broadcasting companies … made arrangements for a broadcast at the end of the Bretton Woods Conference, with White explaining what we had accomplished,” Bernstein recalled many years later, but “Morgenthau did not let White make that broadcast.” The Secretary told

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Acheson, September 1945. (George Skadding/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images) 7B. U.S. delegation members Frederick Vinson and Edward E. Brown in conversation at the Bretton Woods conference, July 1944. (Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images) 8A. J. M. Keynes, flanked by Soviet delegation head M. S. Stepanov (left) and

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U.S. delegation head Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (right), addressing delegates at the Bretton Woods conference, July 1944. (© Bettmann/CORBIS) 8B. H. D. White (center), flanked by British economists and delegation members Lionel Robbins (left) and Dennis H. Robertson (right

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), at the Bretton Woods conference, July 1944. (Courtesy of the International Monetary Fund) 9. J. M. Keynes (center), flanked by Soviet delegation head M. S. Stepanov (left) and Yugoslav

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, July 1944. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images) 10. U.S. delegation head and conference chairman Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and J. M. Keynes in conversation at the Bretton Woods conference, July 1944. (Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images) 11. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt meeting at Wolfe’s Cove railroad

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its financial independence, Keynes was now buffeted by a ferocious blowback from London. He had conceded to the Americans on highly sensitive areas ranging from Bretton Woods transitional rights to sterling convertibility to trade preferences to creditor priorities. Exhausted and surely conscious of his personal legacy as a diplomat and a coauthor

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first conversation we had with our British friends several years ago, when early drafts were being considered.… Throughout the discussions at Atlantic City, throughout the Bretton Woods discussions their views have [been] the same.” The British have always wanted an “International Clearing Union [in which] the greater emphasis should be upon the

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tense multilateral discussions, the United States now took up the battle stance that Keynes and the British had adopted, and Harry White resolutely opposed, at Bretton Woods: surplus countries should be forced to reduce their surplus positions. Congressmen even demanded that the formerly hated scarce-currency clause be invoked against countries such

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in favor of replacing monopoly central banks with competitive private currency issuers.30 Not surprisingly, Triffin’s, Rueff’s, and Hayek’s radical alternatives to Bretton Woods—international money, a revived gold standard, and private money competition—were not congenial to governments, particularly that of the United States. But Friedman’s monetarist

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global trade discrimination to balance its bilateral trade than to stockpile other fiat currencies. The United States had sought to eliminate such discrimination permanently through Bretton Woods. The creditor-debtor relationship between China and the United States today is very different from that between the United States and Britain in the 1940s

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unavoidable. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for one, believes that such a destructive dynamic is avoidable, but nonetheless deeply worrying.47 The Bretton Woods saga unfurled at a unique crossroads in modern history. An ascendant anticolonial superpower, the United States, used its economic leverage over an insolvent allied imperial

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Acheson, Dean (1893–1971). American lawyer and statesman. Secretary of state, 1949–53. A highly intelligent patrician Anglophile, he represented the State Department at the Bretton Woods Conference, where he was the chief American delegate on Keynes’s World Bank Commission. Adler, Solomon (“Sol”) (1909–1994). American economist. Department of the Treasury

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and national service, 1940–45; foreign secretary, 1945–51. Beyen, Johan Willem (1897–1976). Dutch banker and civil servant. Leader of the Dutch delegation at Bretton Woods. President of the Bank for International Settlements, 1937–39. Bidault, Georges (1899–1983). French politician. President, Provisional Government, 1946; foreign minister, 1947–48; prime minister

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–36; ambassador to France, 1936–40. Burgess, Randolph (1889–1978). American banker and diplomat. Represented the interests of the New York banking community during the Bretton Woods negotiations. Opposed the IMF blueprint as unsound. Bykov, Colonel Boris. Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) agent. Whittaker Chambers claims to have introduced him to White in

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White. Chechulin, Nikolai Fyodorovich (1908–1955). Russian banker. Vice-chairman of the board of the State Bank, 1940–55. Member of the Russian delegation at Bretton Woods. Cherwell, Lord (Frederick Alexander Lindemann) (1886–1957). German-born British physicist. As head of the prime minister’s statistical office, he was one of Churchill

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the American loan negotiations in 1945. Eccles, Marriner (1890–1977). American banker. Chairman of the Federal Reserve, 1934–48. Member of the American delegation at Bretton Woods. Tussled with White over his deference to Russian demands at the conference. Eden, Anthony (1897–1977). British Conservative politician. Foreign secretary, 1935–38, 1940–45

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). German economist and government official. Reich minister of economics, 1937–45; president of the Reichsbank, 1939–45. A staunch nationalist and anticommunist, he blasted the Bretton Woods monetary plans as a sop to the Soviets. Tried as a war criminal at Nuremburg. Glasser, Harold (1905–1992). American economist. Department of the Treasury

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, businessman, and government official. Premier of the Republic, 1938–39. A larger-than-life character who claimed descent from Confucius. Headed the Chinese delegation at Bretton Woods. Law, (Andrew) Bonar (1858–1923). British Conservative politician. Chancellor of the exchequer, 1916–19; prime minister, 1922–23. A rare Tory ally of Keynes. Law

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uncooperative approach of the Russian delegation. Molotov, Vyacheslav (1890–1986). Russian diplomat. Minister of foreign affairs, 1939–49, 1953–56. Kept the Soviet delegates at Bretton Woods on the tightest possible leash, forbidding them from making the slightest concessions without authorization from Moscow. He painted any measure of Soviet cooperation as a

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depended on him for advancement and wider influence. Newcomer, Mabel (1892–1983). American economist. A Vassar professor, she was the only female American delegate at Bretton Woods. Nixon, Richard (1913–1994). American politician. President, 1969–74. As a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, sparred with White in his August

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the Treasury, 1934–39. Opie, Redvers (1900–1984). British economist. Counselor and economic adviser, British Embassy, Washington, 1939–46. Member of the British delegation at Bretton Woods. Pasvolsky, Leo (1893–1953). Russian Ukrainian-born American economist. Special assistant to the secretary of state, 1936–38, 1939–46. Heavily involved in economic planning

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dollar as a global surrogate for gold. Ronald, Nigel (1894–1973). British diplomat. Assistant undersecretary of state, 1942–47. Member of the British delegation at Bretton Woods. Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR) (1882–1945). American politician. President, 1933–45. Keynes admired Roosevelt for his bold economic policy interventions. Like Churchill, however, FDR had

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, Frederick Cleveland (1884–1956). American doctor and politician. Republican congressman for Ohio, 1939–51. Member of the House Committee on Banking and Currency. Opposed the Bretton Woods agreements. Spence, Brent (1874–1967). American politician. Democratic congressman for Kentucky, 1931–63; chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, 1943–47, 1949

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Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, 1937–47. A prominent New Deal and pro-labor progressive, close to FDR. Member of the American delegation at Bretton Woods. Waley, Sir David (Sigismund David Schloss) (1887–1962). British civil servant. Under-secretary, Treasury, 1939–46. Prescient with regard to the problems American monetary

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principle of fixed (but adjustable) exchange rates. Wolcott, Jesse (1893–1969). American politician. Republican congressman for Michigan, 1931–57. Member of the American delegation at Bretton Woods. Wood, Sir (Howard) Kingsley (1881–1943). British Conservative politician. Chancellor of the exchequer, 1940–43. Woolton, Lord (Frederick James Marquis) (1883–1964). British businessman and

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Conservative politician. Chairman of the Conservative Party, 1946–55. Opposed Bretton Woods, saying that it meant Britain “surrendering [its just rights] to the power of the dollar, because those responsible for the affairs of this country do

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White.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 26:179–195. Bourneuf, Alice. July 6, 1944. Notes on Bretton Woods Conference. Bretton Woods Conference Collection, International Monetary Fund, Box 15. ———. July 13, 1944. Notes on Bretton Woods Conference. Bretton Woods Conference Collection, International Monetary Fund, Box 15. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Aug. 2010. GDP and Other Major NIPA

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.pdf. Chambers, Whittaker. 1952. Witness. New York: Random House. ———. Dec. 2, 1953. “The Herring and the Thing.” Look. Chicago Tribune. June 12, 1944. “Babes in Bretton Woods.” ———. July 2, 1944. “Among Those Absent.” ———. July. 3 1944. “White Admits Bankers Fight Money Scheme.” ———. July 7, 1944. “Front Views & Profiles.” ———. July 9, 1944. “Good

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. The Monetary Conservative: Jacques Rueff and Twentieth-Century Free Market Thought. Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press. Christian Science Monitor. July 1, 1944. “Monetary World Looks to Bretton Woods Parley.” ———. July 3, 1944. “Money Experts Start on Draft of World Plan.” ———. July 6, 1944. “Money Parley Pace Is Slowed; Fund Transactions Major Topic.” ———. July

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. 2009. “Micro, Macro, and Strategic Choices in International Trade Invoicing.” CEPR Discussion Paper No. 7534. London: Centre for Economic Policy Research. Goldenweiser, Emanuel. Goldenweiser Papers, Bretton Woods Conference, Library of Congress. Goodhart, Charles, and P.J.R. Delargy. 1998. “Financial Crises: Plus ça Change, plus c’est la Même Chose.” International Finance

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/cofer/eng/index.htm. ———. 2012. International Financial Statistics Database. Available at http://elibrary-data.imf.org/DataExplorer.aspx. James, Harold. 1996. International Monetary Cooperation since Bretton Woods. New York: Oxford University Press. Karpov, Vladimir. Jan. 21, 2000. “Notes from the Archive.” Independent Military Review. Moscow. Kennan, George F. 1946. Telegram from George

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: The Clearing Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1980. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXVI, Activities 1943–46: Shaping the Post-war World: Bretton Woods and Reparation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1980. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume XXVII, Activities 1940–46: Shaping the Post-war World: Employment

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Secretary of the Treasury. New York: Skyhorse Publishing. Lindbergh, Charles Augustus. May 19, 1940. “The Air Defense of America.” Speech. Lippmann, Walter. July 13, 1944. “Bretton Woods and Senator Taft.” Washington Post. London Chamber of Commerce. 1942. Report on General Principles of a Post-war Economy. MacMillan, Margaret. 2003. Paris 1919: Six

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. Meltzer, Allan H. 2003. A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 1: 1913–1951. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mikesell, Raymond F. 1951. “Negotiating at Bretton Woods, 1944.” In Negotiating with the Russians, ed. Raymond Dennett and Joseph E. Johnson. Boston: World Peace Foundation. Morgenthau, Henry, Jr. The Morgenthau Diaries. ———. Oct. 25

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Transmitting a Report on the First Year of Lend-Lease Operations. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Rosenberg, Andrew, and Kurt Schuler (eds.). 2012. The Bretton Woods Transcripts. New York: Center for Financial Stability. Rubin, Robert E. May 26, 1998. “Remarks for Opening Plenary China–U.S. Joint Economic Committee—Eleventh Session

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/Historical%20data%201900-1960.pdf. Utley, Jonathan G. 1985. Going to War with Japan, 1937–1941. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Van Dormael, Armand. 1978. Bretton Woods: Birth of a Monetary System. New York: Holmes and Meier. Vassar Encyclopedia. “Mabel Newcomer.” Available at http://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/faculty/prominent-faculty/mabel-newcomer

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Charter and, 14, 119, 121, 127; Austerity, Temptation, and Justice alternatives and, 276–79; beggar-thy-neighbor, 31, 144; Beveridge Plan and, 307; Bretton Woods and, 1 (see also Bretton Woods); Clayton’s European integration plan and, 311–16; deficit spending and, 28–29, 46, 189, 278, 358; deflationary, 24, 46, 48, 76–78

Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead

by Kenneth Rogoff  · 27 Feb 2025  · 330pp  · 127,791 words

painfully relearned in the early 2020s. Today, the global financial system is at a critical inflection point not seen since the early 1970s, when the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system collapsed, or the late 1980s, when the Berlin Wall fell and China’s meteoric rise began to accelerate. The United States

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.S. economy accounted for an astounding 36 percent of global GDP.6 The post-war system of fixed exchange rates, hammered out in 1944 in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, not only placed the U.S. dollar at the center but also gave the dollar extraordinary privileges by design.7 All other participating

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.S. long-term Treasury bond (11.5-year maturity) 1948–1973 U.S. 10-year Treasury bond Gold-dollar standard. Bretton Woods. 1973–2025 U.S. 10-year Treasury bond Dollar standard. Bretton Woods fixed-rate system collapses, leading to high inflation and hyperinflation in the 1970s-1990s. Eventually, the dollar loses Europe but

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about it. Japan, like a number of other countries including the United Kingdom, had seen its inflation exceed 20 percent in the 1970s, after the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate collapse. At the beginning of the 1990s, most central banks’ view of inflation was that you can never have too little of

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be gained by having a unified currency? That bubble burst when Nixon eliminated the convertibility of the dollar into gold in 1971, after which the Bretton Woods system soon collapsed and it was “game over” for Europe’s dollar pegs. With any link to gold gone, and no alternative plan in place

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.3 Back in the 1950s and 1960s, most economists thought the fixed exchange rate regime a solid and workable approach. The dollar-centric post-war Bretton Woods fixed-rate system supported strong growth throughout much of the world in the 1950s and 1960s (though in the 1950s Europe and Japan had intense

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a country (e.g., France) had to change its dollar exchange rate. On this point, Friedman would be proved correct, again and again.6 True, Bretton Woods collapsed in no small part because the United States, at the center of the system, had trouble holding up its end of the bargain, which

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was Germany, where inflation reached only 7 percent at its peak.8 Once again, even in the currency chaos wrought by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, Germany’s beloved independent Bundesbank had outperformed. The Bundesbank wasn’t perfect; 7 percent inflation is anathema to the ultra

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stone by having the rest of Europe stabilize their exchange rates against the German deutsche mark, much as they had done against the dollar under Bretton Woods. This would have the direct effect of stabilizing cross exchange rates across all participating European countries and, it was hoped, would indirectly help tame inflation

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. They evidently believed that with better advanced-country institutions and governance, Europe would not have the same problem. They also knew, of course, that the Bretton Woods system itself had blown up, but they assumed that this was largely because the country at the center, the United States, behaved irresponsibly. Germany could

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States nor the IMF was inclined to challenge the Asian reserve buildups. Besides, the IMF had let Japan accumulate reserves for decades, long after the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate regime had collapsed. Why shouldn’t the rest of Asia be allowed to do the same? As discussed in detail in chapter

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maintain an undervalued exchange rate in order to promote growth.1 They described the international monetary system as having evolved into a Bretton Woods II system analogous to the post-war Bretton Woods system, which mainly encompassed the United States, Europe, and Japan. In their view, this was not a dangerous and unfair system

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rates against the dollar, not propping them up. Thus the Tokyo consensus is a more accurate description of the East Asian development model. Still, the Bretton Woods II analysis was provocative and deeply insightful. Perhaps the technical piece of the trio’s original analysis that was the most strained—even though most

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modicum of post-war leverage in a global financial system that it had ruled for more than a century. The U.S. negotiator at the Bretton Woods meetings, Harry Dexter White, would have none of it. With all the money and financial power, the United States’ preferred post-war monetary system prevailed

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was formed, along with its sister agency, the World Bank, at the end of World War II. The two are sometimes referred to as the “Bretton Woods sisters,” since they grew out of the same meeting in 1944 that produced the post-war exchange rate system.13 Today, the IMF has 190

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the stick, and in the end French insistence on redeeming dollars for gold helped bring down the post-war exchange rate system. The denouement for Bretton Woods came shortly after his death in 1970. Although it was a speech by Giscard d’Estaing in 1965 that popularized the concept of U.S

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kind of empire, forging itself into the world’s largest international debtor. Starting from its privileged position as the center country in the post-war Bretton Woods system, the United States has since expanded its use of debt considerably, albeit in fits and starts. The United States ran massive deficits to finance

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being a battleground in World War II, thereby gaining a giant first-mover advantage in the global economy. On top of that, the post-war Bretton Woods exchange rate system helped enshrine the United States at the center of the currency system. As generous as the post-war Marshall reconstruction plan was

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swan” scenarios. Nevertheless, all in all, it is probably fair to say the vulnerability to a run today is vastly less than it was under Bretton Woods, when the dollar was backed with gold. Are there any big drawbacks to dominant-currency status now that there is no commitment to back the

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professor at Yale University. Testifying before Congress in 1960, he famously predicted that the post-war Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system had inherent inconsistencies that made it unsustainable.22 As the reader knows by now, the Bretton Woods system had the U.S. dollar at the center, and in principle foreign governments could

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Keynesian economist James Tobin in the 1980s. Chapter 16. Fixed Exchange Rates Redux 1. See Michael Dooley, David Folkerts-Landau, and Peter Garber, “The Revived Bretton Woods System,” International Journal of Finance and Economics 9, no. 4 (October 2004): 307–313; Michael Dooley, David Folkerts-Landau, and Peter Garber, “The U.S

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Financial Cycle,” Review of Economic Studies 87, no. 6 (November 2020): 2754–2776. Chapter 17. Global Currencies 1. “Creation of the Bretton Woods System,” Federal Reserve History, written November 2013, www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/bretton-woods-created. 2. Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 3. See Benn Steil, The Battle of

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Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013), and James Boughton, Harry

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default by, 233 financial crisis (1999), 118, 139, 140–44 hyperinflation in, 127 inflation targeting in, 142–43 real, 140 Real Plan (1994), 140, 144 Bretton Woods system, 4, 45, 118, 119, 174, 213, 226, 282 Brezhnev, Leonid (Premier, Soviet Union), 20 Brookings Institution conference, 131–32, 133 Buffett, Warren, 189 Bulgaria

Globalists

by Quinn Slobodian  · 16 Mar 2018  · 451pp  · 142,662 words

of double government that would encase the ineffable market. In place of empire, Robbins, Hayek, and Mises proposed “a world of federations” (Chapter 3). The Bretton Woods system devised in 1944 offered scarce hope to neoliberals that it would function as a guardian of the world economy. The United Nations’ solution to

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that became known as the “Washington Consensus.” Similarly absent are the transformations in international monetary governance, including the rise of monetarism, the end of the Bretton Woods system, the introduction of the euro, and changes in central bank policy. This means leaving out the all-important question of finance, which was perhaps

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flows. Policy autonomy—the ability to tailor economic policy toward the goal of the welfare state—was the hallmark of what was called the Bretton Woods system. The Bretton Woods system realized parts of the neoliberal dream while also deviating radically in other ways. Of more concern was the transformation of the predominant world

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-known case of the role of neoliberal intellectuals in helping to defeat the International Trade Organization (ITO), the institution that was intended to complete the Bretton Woods system, as well as their role in writing first drafts for postwar international investment law. The key players were Michael Heilperin, Philip Cortney, and Ludwig

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human rights, created lasting precedent for international law, and made concrete Hayek’s 1949 demand for a liberal utopia. THE DANGER OF ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY The Bretton Woods institutions were born incomplete. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was responsible for the world’s money. It helped keep currency values stable by making short

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South. What was missing was a body responsible for overseeing trade. The entity planned to fill this role was the ITO, which would complete the Bretton Woods trio. Like the IMF and the World Bank, it would be housed in the UN and provide a legal framework for international free trade. First

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war as well as an associate editor of Fortune magazine, a participant in Bilderberg meetings and in the Bellagio Group meetings that helped end the Bretton Woods system of fixed but adjustable exchange rates.35 Heilperin first became involved with international business circles in 1943, when he took a leave of absence

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the goal of transferring the money over a national border. The right to use capital controls was included in the framework of the IMF at Bretton Woods, a fact that Heilperin condemned as one of its crucial failings. Though many observers felt that the flow of “hot money” being invested by speculators

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the latest variant of economic nationalism.6 Hayek called it a “naïve fallacy” that industrialization was the only way to development.7 Neoliberals saw the Bretton Woods system, which scholars have called embedded liberalism, as a path to isolation feeding delusions of national autonomy.8 The neoliberal critique of mainstream development theories

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Bank and the IMF, both of which determined votes based on national participation in global trade. Hutt’s economistic adaptation of democracy actually scaled the Bretton Woods institutions down to the level of a citizenry. He opposed apartheid in the workplace, but he advocated a new economic hierarchy of electoral privilege to

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national economy while at the League. They were joined by Roberto Campos, a Brazilian economist who had been one of his nation’s delegates at Bretton Woods and the head of the Brazilian Development Bank, whose U.S.-friendly policies had earned him the nickname “Bob Fields.”95 Another former League economist

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rethink the world trade institution for an era after empire and after the dissolution of key parts of the postwar economic order. In 1971 the Bretton Woods system had ended in its original form when the United States unilaterally ceased exchanging dollars for gold. By 1973, responding in part to the diligent

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which must take precedence over all other considerations.”127 The precariousness of a territory like Hong Kong could and should be paradigmatic for a post–Bretton Woods neoliberal world. On its face the GATT was an unlikely spot for a neoliberal legal counterrevolution. Although all of its directors were lawyers by training

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to the global rules. Tumlir saw the post-1945 settlement as similar to this arrangement. Nations agreed to the rules, following the guidelines of the Bretton Woods system and largely adhering to the rules of the GATT. In some ways he saw this as a vindication of Hayek and Robbins’s hope

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Médicis, 1938). 35. Heilperin himself was an advocate of the return of the gold standard. See Anthony M. Endres, Great Architects of International Finance: The Bretton Woods Era (London: Routledge, 2005), 162–173. On the role of the Bellagio Group in advocating the shift to floating exchange rates, see Carol Connell, Reforming

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the alternative vision of order represented by the Havana Charter, see Martin Daunton, “Presidential Address: Britain and Globalisation since 1850: III. Creating the World of Bretton Woods, 1939–1958,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 18 (2008): 14–18. 65. Thomas W. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of

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in the Time of Decolonization,” Humanity 3, no. 3 (Winter 2012): 487. 131. Quoted in Eric Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance: From Bretton Woods to the 1990s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 59. 5. A WORLD OF RACES 1. A. A. Shenfield, “Liberalism and Colonialism,” MPS Proceedings, 1957

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und Kapital: Die Ursprünge neoliberaler Währungspolitik und die Mont Pèlerin Society (Marburg: Metropolis, 2010). 125. Eric Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance: From Bretton Woods to the 1990s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 103. 126. Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

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, 179. See also Embargoes; Sanctions Brandt, Karl, 154, 166–167 Brandt, Willy, 258 Brazil, 84, 193, 199, 201, 283, 339n111 Brentano, Lujo, 74 Bretton Woods: Conference, 134, 199; post–Bretton Woods system, 242; system, 22, 23, 119, 125, 129, 147, 177, 241, 252 Bristol, Lee H., 129–130 Bristol-Meyers, 129 Britain, 14, 27

The Dream of Europe: Travels in the Twenty-First Century

by Geert Mak  · 27 Oct 2021  · 722pp  · 223,701 words

was certainly every reason to work towards a single European currency in due course. By the early 1970s, the agreements made under the post-war Bretton Woods system were no longer tenable. The anchors of the dollar and gold fell away, and the values of the European currencies – guilders, lira, marks, crowns

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, 319, 446, 483, 491 Bos, Wouter 165, 166, 224 Brandt, Willy 434 Branson, Richard 511 Brčko, Bosnia-Herzegovina 88 Breivik, Anders 80 Brennan, John 438 Bretton Woods system 32 Brexit 5, 128, 131–2, 145, 207, 319, 367, 380, 385–99, 414, 416, 421–33, 444, 448, 449, 450, 486; Article 50

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

by Paul Kingsnorth  · 23 Sep 2025  · 388pp  · 110,920 words

-national continent over the heads of its people, who were still attached to their own countries. At the same time, the United Nations and the Bretton Woods settlements, under the aegis of the new American Empire, took the same worldview global, whether the globe wanted it or not. This new consciousness had

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bourgeoisie, 92–94, 96 brain hemispheres, 266, 269 culture and, 271–72 reality relation to, 267–68 Brando, Marlon, 142 Brave New World (Huxley), 296 Bretton Woods, 198 Brexit, 107, 286 Brianchaninov, Ignatius, 260 Bright, John, 135 Britain, 140 cities in, 79–80 Four Ps relation to, 131–32 the queen of

The Making of Global Capitalism

by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin  · 8 Oct 2012  · 823pp  · 206,070 words

Grand Truce with Capital PART II: THE PROJECT FOR A GLOBAL CAPITALISM 3. Planning the New American Empire Internationalizing the New Deal The Path to Bretton Woods Laying the Domestic Foundations 4. Launching Global Capitalism Evolving the Marshall Plan The American Rescue of European Capitalism “The Rest of the World” PART III

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: THE TRANSITION TO GLOBAL CAPITALISM 5. The Contradictions of Success Internationalizing Production Internationalizing Finance Detaching from Bretton Woods 6. Structural Power Through Crisis Class, Profits, and Crisis Transition through Crisis Facing the Crisis Together PART IV: THE REALIZATION OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM 7. Renewing

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conditions for the free movement of capital throughout the world. Precisely because these conditions were so successfully fostered in the advanced capitalist countries during the Bretton Woods era, those years should be understood as “the cradle of the global financial order that eventually emerged.”24 One key feature of this transformation was

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“money changers.”18 It was also significant that the most important planning for the postwar world took place in the Treasury, and led straight to Bretton Woods. In contrast with the State Department—whose “moralistic, pacifist and laissez-faire” orientation to free trade during the 1930s reflected a bureaucracy that, as

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be liberalized on the basis of an international monetary arrangement that would also allow for economic growth and domestic accumulation in other countries. Those planning Bretton Woods could draw on their experience in fashioning the 1936 Tripartite Monetary Agreement between the US, France, and Britain (subsequently joined by Belgium, the Netherlands,

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the broader tasks that the American imperial state was now assuming. The plan Harry Dexter White developed for the Treasury, which laid the foundation for Bretton Woods, was fundamentally predicated on there being “no advantage in achieving a pseudo stability by clinging to restrictive measures that seriously hamper international economic life.”33

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ensuring that, even in the absence of the old gold standard, financial discipline could be imposed on other states. The historic significance of the Bretton Woods Agreement is that it institutionalized the American state’s predominant role in international monetary management as part and parcel of the general acceptance of the

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evolved for the United Nations, especially the composition of the Security Council, still bore significant traces of the old Great Power “spheres of influence,” the Bretton Woods framework was designed to avoid this, and to establish a general system of rules for mediating the international and national economic responsibilities of all states

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could only draw on under much tighter conditions than Keynes’s plan envisaged. The Joint Statement hammered out between the two Treasuries in advance of Bretton Woods was thus largely framed in American terms, securing “discipline” on Britain’s part and “limited liability” on America’s.43 Yet however arduous the

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The Treasury argued that Wall Street’s portrayal of the Fund as a vehicle for capital controls was substantially incorrect. Its official “backgrounder” to the Bretton Woods Agreement emphasized that it “would be incorrect to assume that most capital exports are prohibited under the Fund’s provisions” and that a “careful

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importance of these new capacities for bringing other states into the orbit of the new American empire had already been much in evidence at the Bretton Woods conference itself, where the commission responsible for creating the Fund was chaired and tightly controlled by White. Even though Keynes oversaw the commission and

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Evolving the Marshall Plan As we saw in the previous chapter, the key condition Wall Street had set for calling off Congressional opposition to the Bretton Woods Agreement Act was the creation of the interdepartmental National Advisory Council (NAC) to oversee the making of US international economic policy. And in the

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, as Keynes quickly recognized, “than is usually the case with such Washington Committees.”11 What political economists later called the “embedded liberal” norms of Bretton Woods were little in evidence as US policymakers played the central role in shaping the World Bank and IMF. By insisting on reviewing World Bank loans

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American programs and government agencies “occupy the center of the stage.”13 The fundamental American policy orientation throughout what is often called—somewhat misleadingly—the “Bretton Woods era” was that currency and capital controls should be transitional, not permanent.14 All the essential questions of policy informing the intergovernmental negotiations that defined

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negotiators attached to the 1945 British loan requiring sterling to be made convertible within one year (rather than the five years allowed for in the Bretton Woods negotiations). This was indicative of just how short both Washington and New York initially expected the transitional period for the removal of controls might

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. The Marshall Plan was conceived in this context for quite pragmatic reasons, not because of a new enthusiasm for the normative framework outlined at Bretton Woods.16 A shift in responsibility for the central aspects of international economic policy from the Treasury to the State Department was important here. Whereas the

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dynamic elements inside most European countries. By the time full currency convertibility in Europe was achieved in 1958, it might have been expected that the Bretton Woods framework would finally come into its own in mediating international economic relations in a way that reconciled currency stability with capital mobility, as had always

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the opportunity this gave to internationalize US banking. The vast cross-border flows of private capital this now involved were bound eventually to undermine the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. And a further, much more profound contradiction had arisen—one that overlapped with and to a considerable extent really

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the time the US in 1971 hesitatingly ended the dollar’s link to gold, it was already clear that neither clinging to nor jettisoning the Bretton Woods system offered a long-term solution to this accumulating set of contradictions. Internationalizing Production The American state’s capacity to assume such a central

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, not only the Chicago School but also many Keynesian economists vociferously opposed this on the grounds that it undermined the liberal international economic order that Bretton Woods had been designed to foster. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, John Kenneth Galbraith declared: “[T]he fruits of great strenuous private efforts and

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as the US Treasury had been central to the establishment of new forums and mechanisms for the international management of the “dollar crisis” within the Bretton Woods framework, so was it now central to that framework’s dismantling. This did not involve withdrawing from the multilateral management of the contradictions and

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your problem.” This glib remark by Nixon’s Treasury secretary, John Connally, to European finance ministers in 1971 shortly after the US effectively ended the Bretton Woods system was immediately belied by the increased attention the US gave to international economic coordination throughout the 1970s. While detaching the dollar from gold decreased

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because it is inevitably linked to a fixed exchange rate system. Gold never really served fully the purpose for which it was intended under the Bretton Woods System—regulator of liquidity, enforcer of discipline. It couldn’t because of its own rigidities, and its international monetary role has been dying from

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favor of the temporary use of capital controls were in fact the most conservative and monetarist and the least oriented to the guiding principles of Bretton Woods; German Keynesians (above all the social democratic finance minister, Karl Schiller) were at one with US economists like Galbraith and Kindleberger in viewing capital

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key dimension of capitalist strategies for innovation and the construction of competitive advantage. This could especially be seen when, immediately after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—the world’s central futures market in livestock long after the slaughterhouses were gone from Chicago

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critical to this. Notably, the very settings where senior officials of the advanced capitalist states had met together during the decade-long effort to save Bretton Woods now provided the venues for establishing the legal and institutional framework for floating currencies. The most intimate of these settings were the private dinners attended

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administration’s famous hostility to the IMF and World Bank had contributed to marginalizing their role in the key decisions that determined the fate of Bretton Woods. Yet a more sober appreciation of the utility of the international financial institutions to the making of global capitalism had soon prevailed in Washington.

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was mired in internal stagnation, needs to be understood in the context of the continuing integration of European and American capitalism. The abandonment of the Bretton Woods framework, wherein all European currencies had been fixed in a hub-and-spokes relationship to the dollar, was initially compensated for by the European

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arranged. Its discretionary Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), established in 1934, had not only been extensively used for this purpose after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s; it was also used to pay for the expansion of the Treasury’s responsibilities in the broader management of global capitalism

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Global Society 13: 3 (1999); and “Embedded Liberalism, Disembedded Markets: Re-Conceptualizing the Pax Americana,” New Political Economy 4: 3 (1999). 23 Our argument that Bretton Woods laid the foundation for financial globalization runs counter to the influential interpretation offered in Eric Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of International Finance, Ithaca: Cornell

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Richard Gold, “The Legal Foundations of the US Dollar: 1933–1934 and 1971–1978,” in David M. Andrews, ed., Orderly Change: International Monetary Relations since Bretton Woods, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008, pp. 186–7. 42 As the New York Federal Reserve emphasized in its 1975 Report, whatever the “great difficulties in

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and Robert D. Putnam, Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; and John S. Odell, “From London to Bretton Woods: Sources of Change in Bargaining Strategies and Outcomes,” Journal of Public Policy 8: 3/4 (July–December 1988). 15 Arthur I. Bloomfield, Capital Imports and

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Bernstein, a key Treasury official at the time. See Stanley W. Black, A Levite Among the Priests: Edward M. Bernstein and the Origins of the Bretton Woods System, Boulder: Westview Press, 1991, p. 38. Sufficient compromises—however vaguely worded—were agreed that softened the conditions for adjusting exchange rates, accessing the

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Eckes, Search for Solvency, pp. 174–6. 50 As the Congressional vote approached, the Treasury “orchestrated the presentation of written and oral testimony supporting the Bretton Woods agreement from all sectors of American society,” and supplemented this with radio and film spots, pamphlets, and newspaper, magazine and scholarly articles, as well as

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: European Banking in the 1950s,” in Stefano Battilossi and Youssef Cassis, eds., European Banks and the American Challenge: Competition and Cooperation in International Banking under Bretton Woods, New York: OUP, 2002, p. 42. 22 Marcello de Cecco, “The Lender of Last Resort,” CIDEI Working Paper no. 49 (October 1998), p. 4.

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David M. Andrews, “Kennedy’s Gold Pledge and the Return of Central Bank Collaboration,” in David M. Andrews, ed., Orderly Change: International Monetary Relations since Bretton Woods, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008, p. 101. 36 Andrews continues: “On the one hand, as the central banking foxes took increasing charge of the financial

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(May 1973); and Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1975, esp. Chapter 10. 6 Eric Helleiner in particular has presented the outcome of the Bretton Woods crisis in terms of the American state—well-armed with neoliberal Friedmanite ideas under Nixon and his successors—imposing its free-market will against European

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Personal interview with Paul Volcker, New York, March 2003. 52 See William Glenn Gray, “Floating the System: Germany, the United States, and the Breakdown of Bretton Woods, 1969–73,” Diplomatic History 31: 2, April 2007; and Hubert Zimmerman, “West German Monetary Policy and the Transition to Flexible Exchange Rates, 1969–1973,”

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in David M. Andrews, ed., Orderly Change: International Monetary Relations since Bretton Woods, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. 53 See John Williamson and Molly Mahar, A Survey of Financial Liberalization, Essays in International Finance, No. 211, Department of

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to Development, New York: Monthly Review, 1993, p. 158. 85 Michael P. Dooley, David Folkerts-Landau and Peter Garber, “An Essay on the Revived Bretton Woods System,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 9971, September 2003, p. 2. 86 See Sylvia Maxfield and Ben Ross Schneider, eds., Business and the

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and M. Mastanduno, eds., US hegemony and International Organizations: The United States and Multilateral Institutions, Oxford and New York: OUP, 2003; and Ruth Felder, “From Bretton Woods to Neoliberal Reforms: The International Financial Institutions and American Power,” in Panitch and Konings, American Empire and the Political Economy of Global Finance. 51 Quoted

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Financial Stability Forum, now called the Board, had its membership expanded to include the G20 countries. See Eric Helleiner and Stefano Pagliari, “Towards a New Bretton Woods? The First G20 Leaders’ Summit and the Regulation of Global Finance,” New Political Economy 14: 2 (June 2009). 66 G20 Declaration, “Summit on Financial

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Mexico, 253–4 protests against, 241, 271 surveillance, 155 and Turkey, 217, 434n7 US dominates, 155, 235, 271,428n37 voting power in, 76 See also Bretton Woods; structural adjustment International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), 117, 379n16, 414n42 Interstate Commerce Commission, 32–4 International Trade Organization (ITO), 73, 93

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, 86, 122, 239, 369n76 and ‘An American Proposal,’ 362n3 and approaching 2007 crisis, 312–14, 439n.46 and Asian Crisis, 18, 247–61, 422n66 and Bretton Woods, 70–80, 366n42, 367n50 and deregulation, 178, 399n75 and the dollar crisis, 123–7, 130–1, 381n37, 382n46, 395n19 Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), 250,

Unfinished Business

by Tamim Bayoumi  · 405pp  · 109,114 words

economic instability—and also to World War II. By contrast, the more radical revamp of the global economic order after World War II at the Bretton Woods conference ushered in a long period of growth and prosperity. The crucial question is whether the response to this crisis is a new Versailles or

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a new Bretton Woods. The first section of this book, “Anatomy of the North Atlantic Financial Crisis”, explains how the North Atlantic financial system became so brittle. There was

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an effort to deepen as well as widen the European Community to create a counterweight to the US dollar. Unlike the earlier gold standard, the Bretton Woods system set up at the end of World War II involved a two-tiered global system, with the dollar pegged to gold and other currencies

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, they agreed that the European currencies would fluctuate in modestly narrower limits against each other than those implied by bands around the dollar in the Bretton Woods system, an extremely modest move to European monetary integration.11 These new bands were supposed to be put in place in June 1971, but this

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of a European Monetary Cooperation Fund to support this move.12 This distinctly half-hearted agreement, however, did not survive the final collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system in 1973. Ultimately, the unwillingness of the French, in particular, to surrender sovereignty over fiscal policy to the European Council torpedoed

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the period from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s plans for monetary union were overshadowed by monetary instability coming from the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. Globally, the main challenges were managing the switch from fixed to floating exchange rates and taming inflation, which rose in

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within 2¼ percent of each other’s central parities, half the amount allowed under the Smithsonian Agreement that attempted to resuscitate the doomed dollar-based Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system. The snake was also widened to include prospective new members of the Community, with the United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, and Sweden

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the 2¼ percent fluctuation margins between European currencies while ending any efforts to stabilize their currencies against the dollar. This marked the moment when the Bretton Woods exchange rate system was replaced by a global float of the major currencies overlaid by attempts to stabilize intra-European exchange rates via the snake

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exchange rate regime). Parities could be altered, in theory after discussion with other partners, although in practice this was often ignored (as in the earlier Bretton Woods exchange rate system). Initially dismissed by some as “a mere crawling peg”, the early years saw relatively frequent changes in parities given major difference in

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the 1930s Great Depression in mind, economic cooperation and the avoidance of negative spillovers from exchange rate devaluations was central to the design of the Bretton Woods exchange rate system. In this system, described in more detail in the next chapter, countries kept their exchange rates fixed against the US dollar, which

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two objectives (full employment and a desirable trade balance). Support for this integrated policy framework started to fray soon after the break-up of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s as belief in the active use of fiscal policy waned. This came in large part from a backlash against the

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by an erosion in the belief that policymakers needed to worry about the trade balance. Coming immediately after the financial turmoil of the 1930s, the Bretton Woods system had been sympathetic to government-imposed constraints on the transfer of money across borders. As time went on, however, these constraints started to be

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. Another consequence was that fiscal policy came to be seen as largely ineffective, shifting the focus of policy to central banks. The consensus in the Bretton Woods era that both monetary policy and fiscal policy had a role to play in stabilizing the economy was increasingly replaced by a view that monetary

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financial crises are largely limited to emerging markets and the weakness of their policies. The first of these crises was the break-up of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system in the early 1970s as debt flowed from the United States to Germany and Japan, countries whose economic policies were considered

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the lens of footloose international debt flows that have ebbed and flowed across regions. The Center Cannot Hold: Collapse of the Bretton Woods Fixed Exchange Rate System The collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system in the early 1970s was a watershed event.10 It marked the end of international efforts to

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that replaced it between World Wars had foundered because the parities across currencies were too rigid, creating constraining “golden fetters”.11 In response, the 1944 Bretton Woods conference created a new and more flexible fixed exchange rate system in which countries could adjust their parities in the face of persistent trade deficits

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to limit flows of assets between countries so as to reduce potentially disruptive speculative flows that had bedeviled the interwar gold exchange standard.12 The Bretton Woods system comprised a two-tier exchange rate system in which the dollar was fixed to gold and other currencies were fixed against the dollar. More

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to funds.13 The system became gradually less flexible as the size of international capital flows increased. The neat distinction envisioned by the founders of Bretton Woods between trade-related “current account” transactions and “capital account” transactions in which financial assets were bought and sold became increasingly leaky over time. For example

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old parity continued to be respected for transactions between central banks. The separation of the private and official gold parities sealed the fate of the Bretton Woods system since it took away its underlying logic. The unwillingness of the United States to run the policies necessary to maintain the gold parity undermined

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foreign imports and stopped exchanging gold with foreign central banks. Following four months of negotiations, the major countries agreed to a major overhaul of the Bretton Woods system at the Smithsonian Conference in Washington. The dollar was devalued by 8 percent against gold, the currencies of the other major countries were revalued

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to the Deutsche mark and the yen, Germany and her European partners floated their currencies against the dollar and the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system finally expired. The felling of the Bretton Woods system came from the unwillingness of the United States to subordinate its domestic priorities to the need to maintain a

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American debt crisis came from the need to recycle oil producers’ rising holdings of dollars to new borrowers.15 Soon after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1973 came the 1974 quadrupling of the price of oil, followed by a further doubling in 1979. Since oil was priced in dollars

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international debt pendulum was swinging back to the advanced countries. The Outskirts Cannot Hold: The European Exchange Rate Mechanism Crisis After the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system, the European Economic Community (EEC, later the European Union) tried to maintain fixed exchange rates across its membership even as the

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. The initial arrangement to foster exchange rate stability was the European snake, set up in 1971 as part of the failed attempt to salvage the Bretton Woods system at the doomed Smithsonian Conference.20 The conference agreed to widen the band of fluctuations around dollar parities from 1 to 2¼ percent. This

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, Belgium, and Luxembourg) with Germany was often referred to by the even less appealing tag of “the worm”. These animals survived the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. However, faced with the financial turbulence of the 1970s and the fact that most of the onus to maintain the parity was on the

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was not made public as Schmidt explained that its disclosure would have ended any chances of an agreement at the European level.22 As with Bretton Woods, the ERM gradually hardened and realignments became less common. With the system becoming less flexible and more politicized, investors became less worried about unexpected changes

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of US or Germany policies that helped precipitate the Latin American and ERM meltdowns, respectively, or the multiple speculative attacks at the end of the Bretton Woods system. As in earlier crises, financial markets gave few warnings signs of growing imbalances. Instead of the gradual building of investor concerns about the region

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: The North Atlantic Crisis In many respects the 2008 North Atlantic crisis was an amalgam of these earlier experiences. As in the case of the Bretton Woods break-up, unsustainable imbalances in the United States (in this case driven by private financial flows) led to global disruptions. In the

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Bretton Woods episode, these disruptions were limited because of the controls on private capital flows so that most of the losses were on holdings of dollar reserves.

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cases where banks deliberately financed a crisis on the assumption that they would be bailed out. Banks were not important drivers of the collapse of Bretton Woods or the ERM crises. Bank flows played a more important role in the Asia crisis, but excessive optimism about future growth seems to be a

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Figure 45 at the end of this chapter reports the results for every major country involved in each crisis.29 In the case of the Bretton Woods break-up (the earliest of the advanced country crises) the misery index for the United States is just one, implying a reduction in spending of

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the Latin American crisis, rising to over 30 for the subsequent Asian crisis. This is over thirty times the shock to spending created by the Bretton Woods break-up on the United States, with half of the fall in spending being borne by the crisis countries. It is easy to understand why

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to emerging markets are offset by their smaller weight within the world economy. The impact on global spending rises steadily from around ¼ percent for the Bretton Woods crisis of the late 1960s/early 1970s to 1 percent by the time of the Asia crisis of the late 1990s. It then jumps massively

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composition of debt seems less important, as the relative role of bank and bond finance varies widely. In the case of the break-up of Bretton Woods and the Latin American debt crisis, most of the flows came from banks. By contrast, for the ERM crisis, bond and bank outflows were of

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, where rapid inflows followed by even faster outflows have driven a regular cycle of ever larger international crises, starting with the break-up of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system in the early 1970s and culminating in the North Atlantic crisis almost forty years later. Finally, while some of the flaws

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.Bergsten and Green (2016). 9.IMF (2012b) paragraph 18 and references therein. 10.Garber (1993) contains a more detailed description of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. 11.Eichengreen (1992). 12.Eichengreen (2008) contains a description of the evolution of capital market regulation over time. 13.Skidelsky (2001). 14.The

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Bretton Woods system came to maturity in 1960 after the termination of the European Payments Union (EPU), an arrangement that curtailed even current account transactions because of

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of the crisis that argues that banks lent on the expectations of a bail-out. 27.A partial exception may be the break-up of Bretton Woods, since its likely demise was in the words of one commentator “one of the most accurately and generally predicted of major economic events”, Garber (1993

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terms. However, the misery index still provides an intuitive measure of the size of a crisis. 29.The United States for the break-up of Bretton Woods, Mexico and Brazil for the Latin American crisis, the United Kingdom, Italy, and France for the ERM, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea in the

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Multipolarity, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington DC, 2012. Garber (1993): Peter Garber, “The Collapse of the Bretton Woods Fixed Exchange Rate System”, in Michael D. Bordo and Barry Eichengreen (eds), A Retrospective on the Bretton Woods System: Lessons for International Monetary Reform, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1993. Geithner (2014): Timothy F. Geithner, Stress

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Asset Value calculation, (i) BNP Paribas ABS EONIA, (i) BNP Paribas ABS EURIBOR, (i) Brandt, Willy, (i) Brazil debts, (i) exchange rate collapse (1999), (i) Bretton Woods break-up of system, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii) conference, (i), (ii), (iii) fixed exchange rate system, (i), (ii), (iii) and monetary

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), (ii) on supervision of investment banking groups, (i) see also European Economic Community Evian, Switzerland, (i) Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) Balladur proposes reforms, (i) and Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) crisis (1992-3), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and Delors Committee, (i), (ii) and German reunification, (i

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, (i) currency as international standard, (i) currency union in, (i), (ii), (iii) debt outflows, (i) deregulation, (i), (ii) devaluation, (i) effect of break-up of Bretton Woods on, (i) effect of post-crisis changes, (i), (ii) Euro area lends to, (i), (ii) European universal banks in, (i), (ii) favors larger bank capital

Take the Money and Run: Sovereign Wealth Funds and the Demise of American Prosperity

by Eric C. Anderson  · 15 Jan 2009  · 264pp  · 115,489 words

to discuss the current international monetary “system”—or at least what remains of the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. Back to Bretton Woods In July 1944, 730 delegates from the 44 allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. The three-week conference resulted

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in the signing of the Bretton Woods Agreement, a system of rules, institutions, and procedures designed to regulate the international monetary system

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and thereby avoid a repeat of the conflicting national policies that contributed to the Great Depression of the 1930s.10 The chief features of the Bretton Woods system were an agreement that each nation would adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value, and

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the International Monetary Fund to temporarily bridge payment imbalances. The devil, as the saying goes, is in the details. While the intention of the original Bretton Woods Agreement was to establish a “pegged-rate” currency regime based on the gold standard, in reality the delegates established a principle “reserve currency”—the U

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at the rate of $35 an ounce, and other nations would then “peg” their currencies to the U.S. dollar. As such, the original Bretton Woods Agreement (henceforth “Bretton Woods I”) directly lashed the currencies of a re-emerging Europe and Japan to the U.S. dollar. This meant the values of all other

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to facilitate free trade, avoid nationalist arguments over monetary values, and foster recovery from the Second World War. Take the Money and Run 165 Under Bretton Woods I, U.S. dollars became the international currency. This preeminent role was based on the promise that every dollar a foreign government held could, on

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demand, be converted into gold. (Thus the phrase, “as good as gold.”) As a whole, Bretton Woods I worked because the U.S. was the world’s largest economy and had accumulated a remarkable stockpile of gold as a result of payments

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willing to facilitate development of a trading pattern that enriched the recovering economies in Europe and Japan at the United States’ expense. In any case, Bretton Woods I initially lived up to its promise. While Europe struggled with a balance of payments problem between 1945 and 1950, the Marshall Plan and U

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”14 and Kennedy administration policies aimed at encouraging exports. Nonetheless, by the late 1960s it was clear Bretton Woods I was no longer a viable means of governing the international currency system. The “official” end to Bretton Woods I came on 15 August 1971, when then-President Nixon “closed the gold window,” ending the

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could fluctuate based on economic, military, and political performance, at home and abroad. This is not to say, however, that the fundamental economic principles underlying Bretton Woods had been buried and forgotten. In 2003, Michael Dooley, David Folkerts-Landau, and Peter Garber released a paper titled, “An Essay on the Revived

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Bretton Woods System.”15 According to the authors, the international economic and political system existent during Bretton Woods I is best envisioned as consisting of a “core” and a “periphery.” The United States served as the

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long term to the periphery, generally through foreign direct investment.”16 As Dooley, Folkerts-Landau, and Garber understood economic history in 2003, the collapse of Bretton Woods I was the result of growing prosperity in Europe and Japan. However, they go on to argue that the subsequent period of free-floating exchange

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movements, are driven by the developments of these periphery countries,” with the U.S. again serving as the “core.” The result was the emergence of Bretton Woods II.18 Why Washington at the center? According to Dooley, Folkerts-Landau, and Garber: Asia’s proclivity to hold U.S. assets does not reflect

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finance . . .19 The bottom line: Dooley, Folkerts-Landau, and Garber would have us believe the economic relationships critical for Bretton Woods I have been revived in Take the Money and Run 167 Bretton Woods II, with the periphery using trade imbalances with the U.S. to finance domestic economic development. In turn, the periphery

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economic woes in the periphery, or Asian bankers and consumers will lose faith in the weakening dollar and thereby foster international instability. In either case, Bretton Woods II should either unravel like its predecessor, and/or the international monetary system will enter another transition period. But here is where we part company

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a select set of Middle East nations. These fundamental changes in the international economic and political environment gave rise to a new school of thought; Bretton Woods II was indeed on its way out, and in a manner suggesting that we are not simply in for another “transition” period. At a February

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by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the University of California-Berkeley, Nouriel Roubini20 and Brad Setser presented a paper titled “Will the Bretton Woods II Regime Unravel Soon? The Risk of a Hard Landing in 2005–2006.” The opening line in Roubini and Setser’s paper sets the tone

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risk of a hard landing for the U.S. and global economy will grow.”23 As Roubini and Setser understand the current international monetary system, Bretton Woods II, foreign central bank investments in the United States have “limited the impact of large deficits on the [sale of Treasury securities] and helped to

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as 2% in the event foreign governments turn to investment options outside the United States.25 But none of this addresses the issue of the Bretton Woods II demise. Are we really that close to a fundamental change in the way the international monetary system operates? I, for one, would argue yes

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. Why? First, as Roubini and Setser so ably argue, maintaining Bretton Woods II requires that the key Asian players (China, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea) do more than just hold onto their existing U.S. shares.26

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In order for Bretton Woods II to continue, these Asian central banks, and their counterparts in the Middle East, must continue to substantially add to these U.S. holdings. My

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investors are pulling away from the U.S., foreign government investors, particularly sovereign wealth funds, can not be far behind. The second reason I believe Bretton Woods II is on the wane can be directly attributed to greed. As Roubini and Setser so ably argue, “at current interest rates, U.S. dollar

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emergence of sovereign wealth funds ably demonstrates, there are now other players more than capable of sharing the burden. A quick note on what a Bretton Woods III international monetary system might look like, before we return to sovereign wealth fund-specific concerns. First, it seems highly unlikely there will ever be

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be returned in the form of investment. But here’s the rub: the “core” is no longer simply to be found in North America. Under Bretton Woods III this core could include Brazil, China, India, and Russia.28 In other words, we are moving further away from Triffin’s dilemma. Second, the

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at least have the potential to rival their Western counterparts. Finally, there is a potential for a further “regionalization” of the international monetary system under Bretton Woods III. In this scenario, we have the emergence of additional euro counterparts, for instance the long-awaited “Khaleeji”30 in the Middle East, and a

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, this regionalization would 170 Take the Money and Run almost inevitably result in monetary conflicts along the “seams,” thereby promoting a revisit of the entire Bretton Woods Agreement. What all this suggests is that the international movement away from the dollar, signaled by the emergence of sovereign wealth funds, could fundamentally change

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we appear poised for the emergence of a more “democratic” international monetary system. In place of Bretton Woods I or II, where periphery economies depended on the U.S to maintain favorable trade imbalances, a Bretton Woods III could witness the rise of several “cores” that support smaller peripheries and resultantly do not generate

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political system. Back to the Present For the moment (2008) it does not appear as though Washington will have to grapple with the consequences of Bretton Woods III before the November 2008 presidential election. As of early August 2008, oil-exporting countries in the Middle East were still pouring capital from their

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zones, areas, or “blocs.”55 For instance, prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union there were two prominent currency areas, the U.S.-dominated Bretton Woods I and the Moscow-led Take the Money and Run 175 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). The fostering and exploitation of monetary dependence within

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relatively straightforward, as expulsion from one or the other ultimately suggested almost immediate failure for the economy targeted by this move. Furthermore, forced removal from Bretton Woods I or COMECON would likely have also resulted in a change of government for the nation involved. On the flip side of the coin, staying

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France as a classic case of a mid-sized state in such a situation. More specifically, he refers to the role Paris played in unraveling Bretton Woods I. My own suspicion is that a similar role is now open to UAE, Saudi Arabia, or China, states that could use their existing foreign

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our fiscal policies have left us poorly equipped for operating in the emerging international economic and political environment. As such, it seems safe to conclude Bretton Woods III will be absent a Washington able to employ monetary power as an element of the United States’ international diplomatic “kit bag.” Sovereign Wealth Funds

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.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington DC, 11 June 2008. Chapter 6—Take the Money and Run 1. Nouriel Roubini and Brad Setser, “Will the Bretton Woods 2 Regime Unravel Soon? The Risk of a Hard Landing in 2005–2006,” Paper for the Symposium on the “Revived

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Bretton Woods System: A New Paradigm for Asian Development?” Organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and University of California-Berkeley, February 2005. 2. Henny

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. “Treasury International Capital Data for May,” 16 July 2008. 9. “Dollar Achilles Heel? Next Move on Hold,” Forexfactory.com, 16 August 2008. 10. Benjamin Cohen, “Bretton Woods System,” Prepared for the Routledge Encyclopedia of International Political Economy, New York, 2008. 11. Lawrence H. Officer, “Exchange Rates,” in Susan B. Carter, Scott S

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from the London Gold Pool,” Gold-eagle.com, 21 May 2001.) 15. Michael Dooley, David Folkerts-Landau, and Peter Garber, “An Essay on the Revived Bretton Woods System,” National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper 9971, Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 2003. See also: Dooley, et al., “The Revived

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Bretton Woods System: The Effects of Periphery Intervention and Reserve Management on Interest Rates and Exchange Rates in Center Countries,” NBER Working Paper 10332, Cambridge, March 2004;

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Current Account Deficit and Economic Development: Collateral for a Total Return Swap,” NBER Working Paper 10727, Cambridge, September 2004; and, Dooley, et al., “The Revived Bretton Woods System: Alive and Well,” Deutsche Bank, London, December 2004. 16. Dooley, et al., September 2003. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. For more on

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Bayh, Evan, 159 Bear Stearns, 24, 67, 84, 180 Berman, Wayne, 136 Blackstone Group, 54, 55, 183, 184, 193 Boeing, 124, 125 Breakingviews, 115–117 Bretton Woods, 2, 164, 165–170, 175 “Bright Line,” 40, 91, 139, 145, 147, 154, 191 Buffett, Warren, 68, 179, 180, 182, 193 Burma, 128 Byrd Amendment

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt

by Kwasi Kwarteng  · 12 May 2014  · 632pp  · 159,454 words

and specialist field, that of monetary history. Currency arrangements – the gold standard, which tied the value of a currency to a fixed amount of gold, Bretton Woods, the Smithsonian Agreement of 1971 – have been brokered in the aftermath, or have collapsed under the pressure, of war. It is fiscal policy – the

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belligerents faced an enormous burden of public debt. Yet, rather to the surprise of many politicians at the time, the monetary arrangements established by the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 still put gold at the centre of the system. This time it would be the dollar, and not the pound sterling, which

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‘continental’ paper money, were followed by periods of relative order, exemplified by the gold standard. In much the same way, the relative order of the Bretton Woods arrangements, which lasted almost three decades, followed the disorder of the 1920s and 1930s. It could be argued that the post-1971 settlement, in which

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at any rate, a thinker and writer of real quality, in the form of John Maynard Keynes, had lent an intellectual respectability to them. 10 Bretton Woods Bretton Woods is a phrase which denotes an entire era in the monetary management of the world’s economy. If the inter-war period can be called

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Dexter White, was composed of tough, legally trained bureaucrats who would not be bamboozled by the world-famous Englishman. Of course, by 1944, when the Bretton Woods conference took place, Keynes was at the height of his prestige. The advent of the coalition government in 1940 had swept away Conservatives like Neville

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an ‘inter-Allied stabilization fund’ which, in Morgenthau’s words, ‘should provide the basis for postwar international monetary arrangements’.6 The actual final outcome of Bretton Woods was, to many radicals who did not want to get back to the 1930s, surprisingly conservative. There were respects in which it differed from the

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old pre-war gold standard, but the Bretton Woods Agreement did, to a certain extent, preserve the fetish of gold worship. According to a modern economic historian of the era, there were three distinct

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areas in which the Bretton Woods settlement was different from the operation of the gold standard in its classical form. Firstly, instead of each currency being directly convertible to gold, currencies

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meant that the exchange rates of each currency were pegged indirectly to gold. The peg to the dollar was adjustable when what the negotiators at Bretton Woods called ‘fundamental disequilibrium’ took place. Secondly, capital controls were allowed to limit movements of international capital. The third new element was a new institution,

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but significantly less than the US$26 billion envisaged by Keynes.12 It was not only in the United States, however, that sceptics about the Bretton Woods arrangement arose. The link to gold had irked a number of people in Westminster. One British politician who expressed himself vociferously against the agreement was

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attached to gold and more enamoured with his own idea of Bancor. To Boothby, the White and Keynes plans were ‘irreconcilable’. The ‘agreement reached at Bretton Woods was achieved only because the original Keynes plan was totally abandoned’. Boothby described the Agreement as not even ‘a victory on points for White’. Keynes

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the other way round. Keynes observed in his speech that times had changed. ‘Public opinion is now converted to a new model . . . of domestic policy.’ Bretton Woods reflected this shift of opinion. It is ‘above all as providing an international framework for the new ideas and the new techniques associated with the

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the parliamentarians who had ‘dishonestly’ raised the ‘bugbear of gold’. The debate which took place in the House of Commons in May 1944 on the Bretton Woods proposals was, in Keynes’s view, ‘as disappointing as it could be’. The ‘discussion was certainly not one which did credit to the mother

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the liquidation of the British Empire.’22 Regardless of the motivations of the Americans, the relative strength of the two countries’ position was obvious. The Bretton Woods Agreement reflected White’s scheme rather than Keynes’s ‘not because it was technically superior, but because the Americans had the power’.23 Behind the

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as had occurred ‘between 1894–6 and 1867–8, before any appreciable revival of activity is felt’.33 Despite the remonstrations of Hawtrey and others, Bretton Woods was not a radical departure from the principles of the old finance. The gold link was maintained, much to the surprise of many. The desire

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and capital caused by the war, the economic response of the international community was, as Boothby and others had noticed, one of tepid conservatism. The Bretton Woods system relied, of course, on the United States dollar, but it had not abandoned the link to gold. It marked ‘a set of constitutional rules

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at the time of the Agreement believed would characterize flexible exchange rates. An element of stability was desirable to promote trade.34 More remarkably perhaps, Bretton Woods reflected a degree of international co-operation which had been manifestly lacking in the international politics of the first part of the twentieth century. In

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the economic field’. ‘Surely’, he continued, ‘it is a considerable thing for the experts of so many nations to have agreed’ to the settlement at Bretton Woods.35 To Camille Gutt, the Belgian politician who would serve as the first Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, international co-operation in the

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monetary field,’ he wrote. This was because the ‘idea of money has always been allied to that of national sovereignty’.36 The wider significance of Bretton Woods was in its relative success as an effort of co-ordinated international statesmanship. Although it had the stamp of international co-operation, however, it was

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been located in Washington, the capital of the dominant military and economic nation in the world. The dollar was the basis of the monetary system. Bretton Woods may have marked a turning point in international co-operation, but it was, at the same time, an emphatic symbol and proof of the

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the House Banking and Currency Committee in May 1946, he declared himself ‘unequivocally in favour of the British loan’. To him, the whole point of Bretton Woods was that it provided a solution to the ‘British postwar balance of payments problem’. Without assistance in the form of the loan, Martin did not

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Bank [the World Bank] could take over’.11 The British loan was necessary for Britain to purchase American goods. If it failed, Martin argued, the ‘Bretton Woods program’ would fall ‘of its own weight’, and ‘the prospect of repayment of loans already made’ would be ‘substantially lessened’.12 The details of the

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of US government securities which would develop at the end of the twentieth century. The conservatism of the American banking sector was not that surprising. Bretton Woods itself had been, as we have already observed, a lesson in conservative statecraft. As the Canadian economist Jacob Viner noticed when commenting on the objections

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of English critics, ‘the program for postwar international economic relations which is contained in the provisions of the Bretton Woods agreements [and in] the Anglo-American loan agreement . . . reverts to nineteenth-century doctrines and practices for its inspiration’. Viner, a classical liberal, felt that

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like Humphrey and Martin who bore responsibility for the economic policies of the United States in the 1950s. Contrary to common perception, backed by the Bretton Woods Agreement’s connection of the dollar to gold, the 1950s marked an era of conservative approaches to budgets and currency. It was not a decade

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World War; its sudden collpase had an equally global impact. GETTY IMAGES The resort where the global financial system was repaired. The agreement reached at Bretton Woods would last more than a quarter of a century from 1944 to 1971. © BETTMANN/CORBIS Once again, the demands of war forced governments to print

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would often mean that companies unlucky enough not to be favoured simply could not borrow money. The loan market was ‘often in disequilibrium’.44 The Bretton Woods settlement and its institutions were crucially important for Japan. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT for short, signed in 1947, was

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a stable framework for Japanese economic development. This was achieved through the years of direct rule by SCAP, the reforms of Joseph Dodge and the Bretton Woods system itself. 14 Imperial Retreat American leadership had effectively reconstructed both Germany and Japan. Meanwhile the economic climate in the United States itself began to

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47 His instincts on the international stage were strongly nationalistic, which rather undermined the spirit of international co-operation, under American leadership, which had characterized Bretton Woods. His nationalistic poses also chimed well with Nixon’s views of himself as a ‘tough guy’, a man of action and decisiveness. Connally’s assertiveness

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” of the US Treasury and insist on trading their dollars for gold’ was something which Nixon was beginning to reconsider.50 The ‘death watch for Bretton Woods’ had begun. On 3 May, the German Finance Minister Karl Schiller set off market concern by hinting at the ‘revaluation of the mark’. In

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the United States Constitution. It had been suspended as a consequence of the Civil War, and then resumed. It had now finally been broken. The Bretton Woods Agreement, which had been predicated on a conversion of dollars into gold at the fixed rate of US$35 an ounce, had been unilaterally terminated

…

World War II economic system and replaced it with what former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt . . . called a “a floating non-system”’.61 The end of Bretton Woods was noted as a significant event at the time. In 1972, Henry Brandon, the Washington correspondent of the British Sunday Times newspaper, observed that devaluation

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Nixon claimed that the compact constituted the ‘greatest monetary agreement in the history of the world’. The Smithsonian Agreement had settled on a dollar standard, ‘Bretton Woods without the gold’.3 According to Paul Volcker, who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987, the two years during which

…

was always explicitly recognized that the undertaking by the Europeans to create a common currency was an attempt to recreate the lost stability of the Bretton Woods system, which itself harked back to the pre-1914 gold standard. The Werner Report had sketched out a path to economic and monetary union

…

the benefits of stability as opposed to the free-floating exchange rates which had been a feature of global currency markets since the collapse of Bretton Woods: ‘A stable yuan is of vital significance to the global economic development and the stability of the international monetary system.’43 The consequence of

…

finalized in three weeks from 1 to 22 July 1944. Such combined and purposeful action seemed to elude international policymakers in the years after 2008. Bretton Woods not only set up the IMF and World Bank. It also inaugurated a new currency regime. As far as currencies were concerned in the period

…

the eurozone, given that European monetary union itself was an attempt to restore stability to Europe’s currency in the aftermath of the collapse of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s. Richard Nixon’s closing of the ‘gold window’ therefore had profound consequences. Paper money indisputably contributed to an excess of

…

7. 38Clarke, Keynes, p. 76. 39Ibid., p. 168. 40John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money, 2 vols, London, 1930, vol. 2, p. 149. Chapter 10: Bretton Woods 1Peter Clarke, Keynes: The Twentieth Century’s Most Influential Economist, London, 2009, p. 81. 2Lionel Robbins quoted in Roy Harrod, The Life of John Maynard

…

1968, p. 316. 4Harrod, John Maynard Keynes, p. 536. 5Stanley W. Black, A Levite among the Priests: Edward M. Bernstein and the Origins of the Bretton Woods System, Boulder, CO, 1991, pp. 39, 44. Bernstein’s comments were derived from a series of interviews he gave in Washington in November 1983. 6David

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, Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar, Oxford, 2011, p. 47. 13DNB, ‘Robert Boothby’. 14Robert Boothby, Goods or Gold? The Meaning of the Bretton Woods Agreement, London, 1944, pp. 4–5. 15Ibid., p. 7. 16John Maynard Keynes, letter to the Economist, 29 July 1944, in Collected Writings, vol. 26,

…

Position and Prospects of Gold’, Economic Journal, vol. 50, no. 198–9 (June–September 1940), pp. 207–23, at pp. 207–8. 21R. G. Hawtrey, Bretton Woods for Better or Worse, London, 1946, p. 25. 22Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937–1946, London, 2000, p. xx. 23Ibid., p. xxi

…

2005, p. 23. 35John Maynard Keynes, letter to Lord Addison, 16 May 1944, in Collected Writings, vol. 26, p. 6. 36Camille Gutt, ‘Les Accords de Bretton Woods et les institutions qui en sont issues’, Recueil de Cours, Académie de Droit International, The Hague, 1948, p. 75. Chapter 11: Pax Americana 1Alfred Sloan

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blogs.ft.com/economists, 6 April 2008. Guardian, ‘G20 Summit Marks Largest Such Gathering in a Decade’, 14 November 2008. Gutt, Camille, ‘Les Accords de Bretton Woods et les institutions qui en sont issues’, Recueil de Cours, Académie de Droit International, The Hague, 1948. Hamilton, James D., ‘Monetary Factors in the Great

…

), Oxford Dictionary of Economics, Oxford, 2009 (1st edn 1997). Black, Stanley W., A Levite among the Priests: Edward M. Bernstein and the Origins of the Bretton Woods System, Boulder, CO, 1991. Blake, Robert, Disraeli, London, 1966. Bodin, Jean, Response to the Paradoxes of Malestroit, trans. and ed. Henry Tudor and R.

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of the United States, from 1774 to 1789, 3 vols, New York, 1969 (1st edn 1879). Boothby, Robert, Goods or Gold? The Meaning of the Bretton Woods Agreement, London, 1944. Bovard, James, The Bush Betrayal, New York, 2004. Boyle, Andrew, Montagu Norman: A Biography, London, 1967. Braham, Lawrence J., Zhu Rongji

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, The Presidency of the European Commission under Jacques Delors: The Politics of Shared Leadership, Basingstoke, 1999. Endres, Anthony M., Great Architects of International Finance: The Bretton Woods Era, Abingdon, 2005. Feavearyear, Sir Albert, The Pound Sterling: A History of English Money, Oxford, 1931. Feis, Herbert, Europe: The World’s Banker, 1870–

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Civil War, Princeton, 1970. Harris, S. E., The Assignats, Cambridge, MA, 1930. Harrod, Roy, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, London, 1951. Hawtrey, R. G., Bretton Woods for Better or Worse, London, 1946. Heckscher, Eli, Mercantilism, 2 vols, 1st English edn, London, 1935. Helfferich, Karl, Der Weltkrieg, 2 vols, Berlin, 1919. Hemming

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation

by Grace Blakeley  · 9 Sep 2019  · 263pp  · 80,594 words

to us to bring that new world into being. CHAPTER ONE THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAPITALISM In 1944, the great and the good met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to discuss rebuilding the world economy in the wake of the bloodiest war in history.1 The American delegation, led by Harry Dexter

…

better — the splendour and superiority of the American way was to be shown at every turn. It is somewhat ironic that the decadent crowd at Bretton Woods came up with an agreement that would hold back the re-emergence of the gilded age of the inter-war years

…

. Bretton Woods was meant to prevent the outbreak of not only another world war, but also another Wall Street Crash. Keynes argued forcefully that doing so would

…

from the first half of the twentieth century on the back foot, which made reining in the parasitic rentier class easier. Whilst the negotiators at Bretton Woods were undoubtedly concerned with securing the profitability of their domestic banking industry — not least the emerging power of Wall Street — just one banker was invited

…

capital mobility served to hem in those powerful pools of capital that had wreaked such havoc in the global economy in the period before 1929. Bretton Woods was a significant step forward in reining in the rentier class. But Keynes didn’t get everything he wanted. He was hindered in his battle

…

US gained the “exorbitant privilege” of controlling the world’s reserve currency.5 In other words, as well as constraining international finance, Bretton Woods also institutionalised American imperialism.6 The Bretton Woods conference marked the dawning of a new era for the global economy. Europe set about the long processes of post-war reconstruction

…

’s newest superpower profited handsomely.7 Trade flows increased after the years of autarky during the war, and a new age of globalisation began. Whilst Bretton Woods provided the international framework for this economic renewal, it was at the level of national economic policy that the transition from pre-war laissez-faire

…

significant influence on economic policy in the post-war period. The destruction of the war, the increasing size of the state, and the arrival of Bretton Woods led to something of a rebalancing in the power of labour relative to capital within the states of the global North.9 The rising political

…

in US banks were able to put their dollars in London instead. London’s Eurodollar markets grew substantially as a result. The Eurodollar markets undermined Bretton Woods by creating a global system of unregulated capital flows.13 Those investors holding dollars — pretty much everyone, given the use of the dollar as the

…

Eurodollar markets gave the City of London a new lease of life. But the growth of the Eurodollar markets wasn’t the only threat to Bretton Woods that emerged in the 1970s. The increase in international trade that took place in the post-war period benefitted some countries more than others. US

…

the 1970s. The combination of the emergence of the Eurodollar markets and the rise of the multinational corporation were beginning to place serious strain on Bretton Woods. But it was the US government — not the banks — that dealt the final blow to the system that it had helped to create. With the

…

were far too many dollars in circulation to keep up the pretence, in 1971 Nixon announced that dollars would no longer be convertible to gold. Bretton Woods was finally over. Many expected a sharp devaluation of the dollar at this point, but this didn’t happen. In fact, the dollar — strong as

…

used as the global reserve currency, even in the absence of any link with gold. Finally, the real foundations Bretton Woods had been exposed: American imperial power. The gold peg established at Bretton Woods was not the source of the dollar’s value; the source of its value was a collective agreement that dollars

…

, the power of the US Treasury was finally unleashed, with consequences that would not be felt for three and a half decades. The end of Bretton Woods represented a profound transformation in the international monetary system. Absent any link with gold or any other commodity, money became nothing more than a promise

…

. Private banks were also now free to create currency on their behalf in the form of credit, constrained only by domestic regulation. The collapse of Bretton Woods represented the final step away from a system of commodity money, which has been the norm for most of human history, and towards fiat and

…

of money. The implications of this change would be far more profound than anyone could have seen at the time.16 With the demise of Bretton Woods, capital was finally released from its cage. Many countries continued to maintain capital controls and strict financial regulation. But the glut of dollars that had

…

emerged at the international level needed somewhere to go. Meanwhile, the capital that had been stored up within states like the UK under Bretton Woods was desperate to be released into the global economy. It pushed and strained against the continued existence of capital controls, finding ever more ingenious ways

…

the remnants of the post-war order finally to fall. The Political Consequences of Social Democracy Just as Bretton Woods was collapsing, the social democratic model was starting to show signs of strain.17 Bretton Woods created a global economy, with global corporations, global supply chains, and global competition. Eventually, the system became a

…

against the dollar until, in 1976, sterling below $2 for the first time.19 In this context, one might have thought that the end of Bretton Woods would be good for British capitalists. Freed from the overvalued exchange rate, manufacturers would now finally be able to compete internationally once again. But decades

…

was muted during the early years due to the investment and aid being sent by the US and the increase in global trade facilitated by Bretton Woods. But when things started getting tough — when inflation increased and competition from abroad began to erode profits — these tensions exploded onto the national stage. It

…

under pressure, only one thing determined who got the gains from growth: who had the power. Thanks to rising capital mobility and the breakdown of Bretton Woods, the balance of power between capital and labour had changed by the 1970s. Capitalists could threaten to up and leave if they didn’t like

…

collapse of the post-war consensus as anyone else. They had spent decades working at the global level, trying to unpick the regulations that underpinned Bretton Woods, but the national social democratic settlement looked stable in comparison. The Seventies changed everything. With the US state having dealt the final blow to

…

Bretton Woods, the neoliberals felt emboldened. They knew that this spelled the beginning of the end for capital controls. Rising capital mobility would stand them in good

…

by much deeper shifts in the way the global economy works. It is hard to imagine how shareholders wouldn’t have used the collapse of Bretton Woods and the rise of financial globalisation to increase their power, even if the political struggles that took place within different states determined how much their

…

who gets what.30 The mass-scale channelling of people’s savings into stock markets via pension funds and insurance funds after the end of Bretton Woods and the financial deregulation by the 1980s allowed institutional investors and wealthy individuals from around the world to channel money into the UK’s stock

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in place of a class of powerful workers. The rise of debt-fuelled growth was facilitated by developments at the international level. The demise of Bretton Woods meant that the state no longer had an exchange rate target, which it met by controlling the amount of currency in circulation.6 This represented

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into or out of a country would have made it all but impossible for governments to maintain the exchange rate pegs at the heart of Bretton Woods. But with the removal of restrictions on capital mobility and the rise of the institutional investor, this all changed. Suddenly, a decision on the part

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to socialism”. He could not have picked a more inopportune moment to advance such an agenda. International finance had been emboldened by the death of Bretton Woods and the birth of neoliberalism in the US and the UK — investors were not about to allow one of the world’s largest economies to

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explains the unique depth and breadth of the crisis, as well as much of what has taken place since. Financial Globalisation With the collapse of Bretton Woods and the removal of restrictions on capital mobility, capital was now free to flood into nearly every corner of the globe, giving rise to a

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provided their ailing domestic banks with much needed capital. They rushed to implement stimulus programmes, cut interest rates, and launched the biggest monetary experiment since Bretton Woods in the form of quantitative easing. Those countries not in control of their own monetary policy found themselves facing the wrath of the bond markets

…

The Golden Age of Capitalism 1 This account draws on: Conway, E. (2016) The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944: J. M. Keynes and the Reshaping of the Global Economy, Cambridge: Pegasus; Steil, B. (2014) The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White and the Making of a New World Order, USA: Princeton

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(1997) British Politics Since 1945: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Consensus, Hoboken: Wiley; Helleiner, E (1994) States and the reemergence of global finance: From Bretton woods to the 1990s, New York: Cornell University Press; Duménil and Levy (2004) 10 See, e.g., Addison (1975); Dutton (1997); Duménil and Levy (2004); Boyer

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Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet

by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham  · 27 Jan 2021  · 460pp  · 107,454 words

Understanding Asset Allocation: An Intuitive Approach to Maximizing Your Portfolio

by Victor A. Canto  · 2 Jan 2005  · 337pp  · 89,075 words

Planet of Slums

by Mike Davis  · 1 Mar 2006  · 232pp

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge  · 14 May 2014  · 372pp  · 92,477 words

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up

by Philip N. Howard  · 27 Apr 2015  · 322pp  · 84,752 words

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

by David Harvey  · 3 Apr 2014  · 464pp  · 116,945 words

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa

by Irene Yuan Sun  · 16 Oct 2017  · 239pp  · 62,311 words

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy

by Raghuram Rajan  · 24 May 2010  · 358pp  · 106,729 words

Bureaucracy

by David Graeber  · 3 Feb 2015  · 252pp  · 80,636 words

How Asia Works

by Joe Studwell  · 1 Jul 2013  · 868pp  · 147,152 words

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It

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What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures

by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson  · 17 Sep 2024  · 588pp  · 160,825 words

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town

by Beth Macy  · 14 Jul 2014  · 473pp  · 140,480 words

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization

by Alexander R. Galloway  · 1 Apr 2004  · 287pp  · 86,919 words

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

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Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone

by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols  · 25 Sep 2017  · 391pp  · 71,600 words

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet

by Klaus Schwab  · 7 Jan 2021  · 460pp  · 107,454 words

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities

by Vaclav Smil  · 23 Sep 2019

A Short History of Progress

by Ronald Wright  · 2 Jan 2004  · 225pp  · 54,010 words

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

by Rick Perlstein  · 1 Jan 2008  · 1,351pp  · 404,177 words

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Bryson  · 8 Sep 2010  · 331pp  · 106,256 words

Global Financial Crisis

by Noah Berlatsky  · 19 Feb 2010

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

by John J. Mearsheimer  · 1 Jan 2001  · 637pp  · 199,158 words

Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms: How to Assess True Macroeconomic Risk

by Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak and Paul Swartz  · 8 Jul 2024  · 259pp  · 89,637 words

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

by William Easterly  · 1 Mar 2006

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community

by Marc J. Dunkelman  · 3 Aug 2014  · 327pp  · 88,121 words

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World

by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams  · 28 Sep 2010  · 552pp  · 168,518 words

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

by Bethany Moreton  · 15 May 2009  · 391pp  · 22,799 words

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better

by Andrew Palmer  · 13 Apr 2015  · 280pp  · 79,029 words

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze  · 15 Nov 2021  · 561pp  · 138,158 words

Capitalism: A Ghost Story

by Arundhati Roy  · 5 May 2014  · 91pp  · 26,009 words

Markets, State, and People: Economics for Public Policy

by Diane Coyle  · 14 Jan 2020  · 384pp  · 108,414 words

Growth: A Reckoning

by Daniel Susskind  · 16 Apr 2024  · 358pp  · 109,930 words

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989

by Kristina Spohr  · 23 Sep 2019  · 1,123pp  · 328,357 words

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives

by Satyajit Das  · 15 Nov 2006  · 349pp  · 134,041 words

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation

by Brendan Simms  · 27 Apr 2016  · 380pp  · 116,919 words

The Art of Corporate Success: The Story of Schlumberger

by Ken Auletta  · 28 Sep 2015  · 161pp  · 52,058 words

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making

by David Rothkopf  · 18 Mar 2008  · 535pp  · 158,863 words

Half In, Half Out: Prime Ministers on Europe

by Andrew Adonis  · 20 Jun 2018  · 235pp  · 73,873 words

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices

by Robert McNally  · 17 Jan 2017  · 436pp  · 114,278 words

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

by Peter Pomerantsev  · 11 Nov 2014  · 251pp  · 80,243 words

Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad That Crossed an Ocean

by Les Standiford  · 4 Aug 2003  · 259pp  · 73,473 words

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe

by Greg Ip  · 12 Oct 2015  · 309pp  · 95,495 words

Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality

by Vito Tanzi  · 28 Dec 2017

The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945-1947

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan  · 9 Apr 2018

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon

by Neil Sheehan  · 21 Sep 2009  · 589pp  · 197,971 words

It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong  · 9 Apr 2009  · 403pp  · 125,659 words

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

by Richard Heinberg  · 1 Jun 2011  · 372pp  · 107,587 words

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be

by Diane Coyle  · 11 Oct 2021  · 305pp  · 75,697 words

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405

by John Darwin  · 5 Feb 2008  · 650pp  · 203,191 words

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy

by Francis Fukuyama  · 20 Mar 2007  · 214pp  · 57,614 words

Portfolio Design: A Modern Approach to Asset Allocation

by R. Marston  · 29 Mar 2011  · 363pp  · 28,546 words

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street

by Justin Fox  · 29 May 2009  · 461pp  · 128,421 words

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety

by Gideon Rachman  · 1 Feb 2011  · 391pp  · 102,301 words

End This Depression Now!

by Paul Krugman  · 30 Apr 2012  · 267pp  · 71,123 words

The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer

by Dean Baker  · 15 Jul 2006  · 234pp  · 53,078 words

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery

by Stewart Lansley  · 19 Jan 2012  · 223pp  · 10,010 words

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business

by Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan  · 28 Jan 2020  · 218pp  · 62,889 words

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero

by Tyler Cowen  · 8 Apr 2019  · 297pp  · 84,009 words

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance

by Noam Chomsky  · 1 Jan 2003  · 351pp  · 96,780 words

Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet

by Edward Luce  · 13 May 2025  · 612pp  · 235,188 words

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens

by Gabriel Zucman, Teresa Lavender Fagan and Thomas Piketty  · 21 Sep 2015  · 121pp  · 34,193 words

Stocks for the Long Run, 4th Edition: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long Term Investment Strategies

by Jeremy J. Siegel  · 18 Dec 2007

India's Long Road

by Vijay Joshi  · 21 Feb 2017

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History

by Diane Coyle  · 23 Feb 2014  · 159pp  · 45,073 words

Greater: Britain After the Storm

by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis  · 19 May 2021  · 516pp  · 116,875 words

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place

by Felix Marquardt  · 7 Jul 2021  · 250pp  · 75,151 words

Hedgehogging

by Barton Biggs  · 3 Jan 2005

Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge

by Ian Kumekawa  · 6 May 2025  · 422pp  · 112,638 words

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society

by David Wolman  · 14 Feb 2012  · 275pp  · 77,017 words

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

by Tim Harford  · 2 Feb 2021  · 428pp  · 103,544 words

Automation and the Future of Work

by Aaron Benanav  · 3 Nov 2020  · 175pp  · 45,815 words

Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round

by Daniel Davies  · 14 Jul 2018  · 294pp  · 89,406 words

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel  · 12 Aug 2020  · 286pp  · 87,168 words

1946: The Making of the Modern World

by Victor Sebestyen  · 30 Sep 2014  · 476pp  · 144,288 words

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory

by Kariappa Bheemaiah  · 26 Feb 2017  · 492pp  · 118,882 words

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India

by Edward Luce  · 23 Aug 2006  · 403pp  · 132,736 words

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

by Mariana Mazzucato  · 1 Jan 2011  · 382pp  · 92,138 words

Why We Can't Afford the Rich

by Andrew Sayer  · 6 Nov 2014  · 504pp  · 143,303 words

Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics

by Francis Fukuyama  · 27 Aug 2007

Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964)

by Unknown  · 7 Jun 2012

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets

by Donald MacKenzie  · 24 May 2021  · 400pp  · 121,988 words

How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes

by Peter D. Schiff and Andrew J. Schiff  · 2 May 2010

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

by Chrystia Freeland  · 11 Oct 2012  · 481pp  · 120,693 words

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap

by Graham Allison  · 29 May 2017  · 518pp  · 128,324 words

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite

by Michael Lind  · 20 Feb 2020

Data and the City

by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle  · 2 Aug 2017

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire

by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson  · 14 Apr 2020  · 491pp  · 141,690 words

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

by Charles Eisenstein  · 11 Jul 2011  · 448pp  · 142,946 words

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change

by Ehsan Masood  · 4 Mar 2021  · 303pp  · 74,206 words

Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

by Lynne Olson  · 2 Feb 2010  · 564pp  · 178,408 words

The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce  · 20 Apr 2017  · 223pp  · 58,732 words

Powers and Prospects

by Noam Chomsky  · 16 Sep 2015

State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century

by Francis Fukuyama  · 7 Apr 2004

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

by David Graeber  · 14 May 2018  · 385pp  · 123,168 words

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

by Matt Taibbi  · 15 Feb 2010  · 291pp  · 91,783 words

The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio

by William J. Bernstein  · 26 Apr 2002  · 407pp  · 114,478 words

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality

by Katharina Pistor  · 27 May 2019  · 316pp  · 117,228 words

America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve

by Roger Lowenstein  · 19 Oct 2015  · 589pp  · 128,484 words

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America

by Danielle Dimartino Booth  · 14 Feb 2017  · 479pp  · 113,510 words

Fully Automated Luxury Communism

by Aaron Bastani  · 10 Jun 2019  · 280pp  · 74,559 words

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them

by Joseph E. Stiglitz  · 15 Mar 2015  · 409pp  · 125,611 words

China's Superbank

by Henry Sanderson and Michael Forsythe  · 26 Sep 2012

Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market Into a Casino

by Jim McTague  · 1 Mar 2011  · 280pp  · 73,420 words

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business

by Rana Foroohar  · 16 May 2016  · 515pp  · 132,295 words

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics

by John B. Judis  · 11 Sep 2016  · 177pp  · 50,167 words

Big Debt Crises

by Ray Dalio  · 9 Sep 2018  · 782pp  · 187,875 words

Culture and Imperialism

by Edward W. Said  · 29 May 1994  · 549pp  · 170,495 words

Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe

by Gillian Tett  · 11 May 2009  · 311pp  · 99,699 words

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe

by Denis MacShane  · 14 Jul 2017  · 308pp  · 99,298 words

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics

by David Goodhart  · 7 Jan 2017  · 382pp  · 100,127 words

Market Wizards: Interviews With Top Traders

by Jack D. Schwager  · 7 Feb 2012  · 499pp  · 148,160 words

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution

by David Harvey  · 3 Apr 2012  · 206pp  · 9,776 words

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest

by Andrew W. Lo and Stephen R. Foerster  · 16 Aug 2021  · 542pp  · 145,022 words

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them

by Philip Collins  · 4 Oct 2017  · 475pp  · 156,046 words

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You

by Misha Glenny  · 3 Oct 2011  · 274pp  · 85,557 words

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse

by Mohamed A. El-Erian  · 26 Jan 2016  · 318pp  · 77,223 words

The New Prophets of Capital

by Nicole Aschoff  · 10 Mar 2015  · 128pp  · 38,187 words

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds

by Maneet Ahuja, Myron Scholes and Mohamed El-Erian  · 29 May 2012  · 302pp  · 86,614 words

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World

by Dambisa Moyo  · 3 May 2021  · 272pp  · 76,154 words

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

by Kate Raworth  · 22 Mar 2017  · 403pp  · 111,119 words

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

by Amy Webb  · 5 Mar 2019  · 340pp  · 97,723 words

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age

by Duncan J. Watts  · 1 Feb 2003  · 379pp  · 113,656 words

Culture of Terrorism

by Noam Chomsky  · 19 Oct 2015

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments

by Michael Batnick  · 21 May 2018  · 198pp  · 53,264 words

On Nature and Language

by Noam Chomsky  · 16 Apr 2007

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It

by Steven Brill  · 28 May 2018  · 519pp  · 155,332 words

The Centrist Manifesto

by Charles Wheelan  · 18 Apr 2013  · 104pp  · 30,990 words

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

by Tim O'Reilly  · 9 Oct 2017  · 561pp  · 157,589 words

The Rise of the Quants: Marschak, Sharpe, Black, Scholes and Merton

by Colin Read  · 16 Jul 2012  · 206pp  · 70,924 words

The Global Money Markets

by Frank J. Fabozzi, Steven V. Mann and Moorad Choudhry  · 14 Jul 2002

Does Capitalism Have a Future?

by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye and Audible Studios  · 15 Nov 2013  · 238pp  · 73,121 words

Hawai'I Becalmed: Economic Lessons of the 1990s

by Christopher Grandy  · 30 Sep 2002  · 145pp  · 43,599 words

The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business

by Richard Brooks  · 2 Jan 2014  · 301pp  · 88,082 words

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

by Gerald Posner  · 3 Feb 2015  · 1,590pp  · 353,834 words

Why Government Is the Problem

by Milton Friedman  · 1 Feb 1993  · 25pp  · 7,179 words

Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin

by Jesse Berger  · 14 Sep 2020  · 108pp  · 27,451 words