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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

, 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

…

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

…

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

…

), 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

…

, 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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

–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

…

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

…

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

…

). 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

…

, 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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

, 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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

.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

…

. 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

…

. 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

…

/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

…

: 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

…

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

…

. 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

…

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

…

/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

…

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

The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism

by Adrian Wooldridge  · 7 Apr 2026  · 342pp  · 129,097 words

United Nations appeared for the first time in January 1942 in a treaty under which twenty-six nations pledged to overthrow the Axis powers. The Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 looked forward to a world in which nations traded freely and two new institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, provided financial

…

per cent economic growth from 1955 to 1965, was called the Liberal Democrats. If the emerging new order had a distinctly American feel to it – Bretton Woods was a rickety hotel in New Hampshire and the UN Charter, signed in San Francisco on 26 June 1945, began with the phrase ‘We, the

…

investment and thereby create jobs for workers and demand for the products of those workers. Keynes was the presiding genius at the 1944 meeting in Bretton Woods (indeed the reason for holding the meeting in an obscure hotel in New Hampshire was that Keynes, who had a serious heart condition, couldn’t

…

the weekend feeding USAID to the woodchipper,’ he chirped on X. Though Trump doesn’t have the power to feed the UN, NATO or the Bretton Woods twins into the woodchipper, he can certainly make their lives miserable, depriving them of money and undermining their ability to operate. The liberal order depends

…

oligarchy 80–81 Brampton Manor 276 Brandeis, Louis 79, 261–2; The Curse of Bigness 80 Bravin, Tracy 179 Brazil 130, 159 Breitbart, Andrew 196 Bretton Woods Conference (1944) 100, 102, 109, 288 Brexit x, 149, 155, 165–6, 191, 192, 223, 231, 260, 292, 296, 301 Bridges, George 137 Bright, John

…

Kepel, Gilles 181 Ketteler, Wilhelm von 15 Keynes, John Maynard xiii, xiv, xix, 202 A General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money 108–9, 110 Bretton Woods and 109 capitalism providing wherewithal for civilized society, views 316 demand management and 104, 109 ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’ 75 liberal intellectual and 108

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

…

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

…

‘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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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,

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

” 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

…

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

…

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

…

, 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

…

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.

…

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

…

, 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–

…

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

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society

by Binyamin Appelbaum  · 4 Sep 2019  · 614pp  · 174,226 words

their currencies to make their own exports cheaper and more attractive. White and his foreign counterparts, including John Maynard Keynes, who represented Britain at the Bretton Woods conference, thought that competitive currency devaluations in the early 1930s had driven a collapse in trade, which had plunged the world into the Depression and

…

a universal currency. Before World War I, major trading nations had fixed exchange rates by promising to redeem their currencies for specified amounts of gold. Bretton Woods was an ersatz gold standard: other nations pledged to redeem their currencies for dollars, and the United States promised that it would redeem dollars for

…

largely succeeded in stabilizing exchange rates for three decades. The world experienced a recrudescence of prosperity the French fondly dubbed Les Trente Glorieuses. But the Bretton Woods system ultimately undermined the economic dominance of the United States. The root of the problem was that the rest of the world needed dollars. In

…

of foreign rivals on the home front even as they struggled in export markets. The American economy tilted toward consumption at the expense of production. Bretton Woods barred unilateral currency devaluations, but it did allow nations to negotiate changes in exchange rates when it was necessary to adjust to changes in economic

…

gold in the federal government’s vaults. By 1963, foreign governments held enough dollars to claim every ounce of gold at Fort Knox, reducing the Bretton Woods Agreement to a convenient fiction that would last only as long as foreign nations refrained from calling those claims.12 The United States tried to

…

postpone the day of reckoning by slowing the outflow of dollars. But in attempting to preserve the Bretton Woods system, the United States gradually pulled back from its stated purpose of increasing trade among nations. The government limited foreign lending by American banks and

…

made a promise it could not keep. By 1969, West Germany alone held enough dollars to drain Fort Knox. Milton Friedman worked to end the Bretton Woods system almost from the hour of its creation, telling anyone who would listen that nations should let financial markets determine exchange rates.* He was among

…

the first to call attention to the fact that Bretton Woods was buttressed and preserved by limits on trade. He also warned, with considerable prescience, that the stability of the system was maintained only by deferring

…

the deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, to whom Friedman offered the unsolicited advice that Canada should float its currency, effectively withdrawing from the Bretton Woods Agreement, which it had only just signed.17 Friedman offered the same advice to every other nation in a 1953 paper, “The Case for Flexible

…

Exchange Rates.” Terminating Bretton Woods in favor of floating rates, he wrote, was “absolutely essential for the fulfillment of our basic economic objective: The achievement and maintenance of a free

…

and prosperous world community engaging in unrestricted multilateral trade.”18 Under the Bretton Woods system, an American business was willing to accept 360 yen instead of $1 because the Japanese government guaranteed that 360 yen could be exchanged for

…

or each yen, is a claim on that nation’s economic output. Friedman said relying on markets would correct the flaw at the heart of Bretton Woods, because exchange rates would adjust without political impediments. Better yet, he said these adjustments would be gradual and smooth, reflecting the slow pace of change

…

of major economies. Reliance on the market, he said, would support trade and increase prosperity. In other words, markets would achieve the goals of Bretton Woods better than Bretton Woods. Friedman and the policy-making establishment once again were wrestling over the best way to deal with uncertainty. The interdependence of national economies was

…

1968, Paul Samuelson estimated 90 percent of academic economists accepted Friedman’s argument in favor of adjustable rates (Samuelson numbered himself among the converts). The Bretton Woods system, in their view, was suppressing trade, as well as failing to allow for adjustments in exchange rates. Samuelson said, however, that he still saw

…

. Cross-border investment flows had grown even more quickly than international trade in goods and services; the quicksilver changes in those capital flows pushed the Bretton Woods system past its breaking point. Britain surrendered first, announcing on November 18, 1967, that it would start selling pounds for just $2.40. The British

…

far in declaring, “It will be remembered as the most dishonest statement ever made.”22 The Johnson administration rushed out a press release “unequivocally” backing Bretton Woods. But Gardner Ackley, chairman of Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers, privately warned that America would need to devalue the dollar, too. It was only

…

Nationalism During the 1968 election campaign, Richard Nixon asked Arthur F. Burns, his top economic adviser, to sound out European governments on the future of Bretton Woods. Burns reported the situation was “very precarious,” but not beyond repair. He urged Nixon to seek a new set of fixed rates. “Let us

…

not want to be bothered by international monetary matters.”26 So, for two years, Nixon let Volcker conduct desultory talks with foreign governments. Meanwhile, the Bretton Woods system continued to fall apart. France followed Britain, devaluing its currency in August 1969. The following spring, in May 1970, Canada became the first major

…

: George Shultz.”51 In September 1971, Shultz arranged for Friedman to meet with Connally at the latter’s Washington home. Friedman lauded Connally for abandoning Bretton Woods and argued against any return to fixed rates. After the meeting, Friedman wrote Connally, “You deserve enormous credit for the courageous and determined stand you

…

granting the United States veto power and furthermore clarifying that it reserved the right to float the dollar irrespective of any vote. Washington had given Bretton Woods to the world, and Washington took it away. Those like Robert Roosa and Arthur Burns who had predicted floating rates would cause a collapse in

…

back a few weeks later offering encouragement but pointing out the moment was not ripe because changes in exchange rates were rare events under the Bretton Woods system. After Nixon’s speech, Melamed himself wrote to Friedman, persuading the professor to travel from his vacation home in Vermont for a breakfast

…

spiked and foreign investors raced to acquire dollars, so they could participate in the lucrative business of lending money to the United States. During the Bretton Woods years, America and other major nations had imposed strict limits on international capital flows to maintain the stability of exchange rates. But the United States

…

a phrase coined by one of his predecessors in the 1960s — though that dubious privilege was now being conferred by the market rather than the Bretton Woods system.82 Foreign companies that had borrowed in dollars also were punished. The British airline entrepreneur Freddie Laker had launched a daily “Skytrain” service between

…

pattern of borrowing and consuming, and this time, it found a foreign partner willing to finance its habit on an even larger scale: China. At Bretton Woods in 1944, the Roosevelt administration had made the fateful decision to resist pressure, especially from the United Kingdom, to impose limits on trade surpluses. The

…

everyone ultimately would benefit from constraints on trade imbalances. China tied its currency to the dollar in the mid-1990s, in effect signing a unilateral Bretton Woods agreement. Initially the Chinese were trying to suppress inflation and avoid the exchange-rate volatility then plaguing other Asian nations. But as the growth of

…

multinational currency: Western Europe.104 Neither Mundell nor Meade made much of an impression on policy makers at the time. Europe remained committed to the Bretton Woods system. But the debate continued to smolder, and the University of Chicago inevitably was the place that kept the embers alive. Mundell, who had

…

was most concise and precise — and had lived in West Germany and Belgium.110 Padoa-Schioppa wrote that the European Monetary System (EMS), like the Bretton Woods system, was inherently flawed, and for basically the same reasons. It was not flexible enough to survive changes in economic relations among the major participating

…

the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which provided financial assistance to the Chilean government.51 Those institutions, created as part of the Bretton Woods system to encourage the development of the international economy, emerged in the 1980s as zealots in the cause of market freedom, including the free flow

…

Germany and Switzerland, experienced an economic downturn but did not experience higher inflation. 23. The move toward monetarism was influenced by the end of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, which is described in chapter 8. The system of fixed rates created a target for the money supply; in its

…

conference that spread monetarist ideas in Germany. See Andreas Beyer et al., “Opting Out of the Great Inflation: German Monetary Policy After the Breakdown of Bretton Woods,” September 2008, The Great Inflation Conference, National Bureau of Economic Research. 24. At the Nobel awards dinner, Friedman joked that it was awkward to accept

…

while exchange rates remained the same: to increase exports, nations needed to drive down domestic wages and prices. This painful option was still available under Bretton Woods, but it had become politically untenable. The expansion of suffrage and labor unions, among other trends, had shifted the balance of political power across the

…

memos on floating rates prepared in the aftermath of the broadcast. Two years later, in 1950, Canada floated its exchange rate in violation of the Bretton Woods Agreement. 18. Milton Friedman, “The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates,” in Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 157–203. The paper

…

:39,” White House Tapes, Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, Calif. 58. Solomon, The International Monetary System, 336. 59. Harold James, International Monetary Cooperation Since Bretton Woods (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 242. 60. Shultz secured Nixon’s permission at a meeting just before the conference where he told the President

…

in December 1981 announcing that it had not intervened in currency markets during the previous six months, the first such stretch since the end of Bretton Woods. The Fed customarily defers to the Treasury on foreign exchange policy, carrying out the executive branch’s instructions, but Volcker wasn’t inclined to

…

, ref6, ref7, ref8 Born, Brooksley, ref1, ref2 Brandeis, Louis, ref1 Brash, Don, ref1, ref2 Brazil, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Brennan, William, ref1 Bretton Woods Agreement, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bretton Woods system: changes in exchange rates, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; collapse of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; and dollar standard

…

, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Buchanan, James M., ref1, ref2, ref3 Buckley, William F., ref1 Burger, Warren, ref1 Burns, Arthur F.: and Martin Anderson, ref1; on Bretton Woods system, ref1, ref2; as Federal Reserve chairman, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; and Milton Friedman, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; and inflation, ref1, ref2, ref3

…

, ref2 Byrd, Robert, ref1 Cairncross, Alexander, ref1 Califano, Joseph A., Jr., ref1, ref2 Callaghan, James, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Canada: and airline industry, ref1; and Bretton Woods system, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; exchange rate of, ref1; and inflation target, ref1; and monetary targets, ref1, ref2; and tax brackets, ref1, ref2; and trade

…

, II, ref1 Ford, John J., ref1 Ford Foundation, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Foundation for Economic Education, ref1 Fourcade, Marion, ref1 Foxley, Alejandro, ref1 France: and Bretton Woods system, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; and economic integration, ref1, ref2, ref3; and exchange rates, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; income growth in, ref1; and inflation

…

, ref2 Friedman, Milton: and Martin Anderson, ref1, ref2; and antitrust regulation, ref1; and Richard Armey, ref1; awards of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; on Bretton Woods system, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; and Arthur Burns, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; and Chile, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; and China, ref1, ref2

…

Gaskins, Darius, ref1, ref2, ref3 Gates, Howard P., ref1, ref2 Gates, Thomas S., Jr., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 generational earning power, ref1, ref2 Germany: and Bretton Woods system, ref1, ref2, ref3; and capital controls, ref1, ref2; and corporations, ref1; and economic integration, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; economy of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

…

, ref1 Jarvis, Howard, ref1 Jefferson, Thomas, ref1, ref2, ref3 Johnson, Lyndon B.: antipoverty programs of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; and antitrust regulation, ref1; and Bretton Woods system, ref1; and cost-benefit analysis, ref1, ref2; and defense spending, ref1; economic policy of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; and foreign travel limits, ref1, ref2

…

, ref1; and taxation, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; and Vietnam War, ref1; and Paul Volcker, ref1 Keyes, Lucile Sheppard, ref1 Keynes, John Maynard: and Bretton Woods conference, ref1, ref2, ref3; economic theories of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14; on foreign lending, ref1

…

, ref2 Rodrik, Dani, ref1, ref2, ref3 Rogoff, Kenneth, ref1, ref2, ref3 Roosa, Robert, ref1, ref2, ref3 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano: and antitrust regulation, ref1, ref2; and Bretton Woods system, ref1; and Camp David, ref1; economic advisers of, ref1, ref2, ref3; and international monetary system, ref1; and John Maynard Keynes, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

…

Robert, ref1, ref2, ref3 Rumsfeld, Donald, ref1, ref2, ref3 Rust Belt, ref1, ref2 Ryan, Tony, ref1, ref2 Safire, William, ref1, ref2, ref3 Samuelson, Paul: on Bretton Woods system, ref1, ref2; economic theory of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; on John F. Kennedy, ref1, ref2; on John Maynard Keynes, ref1, ref2, ref3; on

…

; and Richard Nixon, ref28, ref29, ref30; and post– World War II, ref31; and Ronald Reagan, ref32, ref33; and supply-side economics, ref34 United Kingdom: and Bretton Woods system, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; and deregulation, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12; and employment, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16; and environmental regulation, ref17

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

”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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

. 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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

, 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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

.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

…

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

…

. “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

…

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

…

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;

…

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

…

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

Paper Promises

by Philip Coggan  · 1 Dec 2011  · 376pp  · 109,092 words

CHOICES THE EURO Chapter 7 - Blowing Bubbles FORTY YEARS OF BUBBLES THE MINSKY EFFECT THE SUB-PRIME BOOM BUBBLES, PAPER MONEY AND THE END OF BRETTON WOODS WHACK-A-MOLE DISGUISED INFLATION Chapter 8 - Riding the Gravy Train EFFICIENT-MARKET THEORY REGULATION THE BIGGER, THE BETTER A CHANGE OF ATTITUDE Chapter 9

…

allowed me to develop my own interpretation of events. Special mention should be given to Richard Duncan, whose books suggested the idea that the post-Bretton Woods era and asset inflation were intimately related. In researching this book, I have been lucky to work for such an understanding employer as the Economist

…

on creditors were rejected by the Americans, a decision that the US may be starting to regret, given China’s financial power. The collapse of Bretton Woods in the 1970s seemed to favour the debtor countries, not the creditors. Countries were now free to depreciate their currencies on a regular basis. Many

…

hundred years have revolved around changes in exchange-rate systems, from the abandonment, re-adoption and then re-abandonment of the gold standard, through the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 and its failure in the early 1970s, to the creation of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which was followed by the adoption

…

globe. But, as we shall see, they were at times forced to adjust interest rates to defend the standard, regardless of domestic economic conditions. Under Bretton Woods, exchange rates were fixed, interest rates were set domestically, but capital did not flow freely. This stopped speculators from exploiting interest rate differentials between countries

…

follows this approach, managing its exchange rate within tight bands and limiting the scope for foreigners to build up renminbi holdings. Since the failure of Bretton Woods, developed countries have stopped trying to fix their exchange rates, allowing them to let capital flow freely and to set their own interest rates. At

…

comprising fixed percentages of the dollar, pound, yen and various European currencies. But the SDR was not to be used seriously until well after the Bretton Woods era was past.) Under Keynes’s plan, a country with a persistent deficit would run up against its overdraft limit, and would devalue its currency

…

circulation, nor could private investors convert their bank notes into bullion. Only other central banks had that privilege with the US Federal Reserve. The original Bretton Woods agreement tried to avoid another problem associated with the gold standard – it recognized the right of nations to devalue their currencies. The idea was to

…

They did not want the markets to have the ability to point out when monetary policy was incompatible with the exchange-rate target. Establishing the Bretton Woods system evoked many of the arguments that still rage today. Graham favoured floating exchange rates, but that turned out to be a policy whose time

…

the 1960s and 1970s by the Chicago economists Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas. The creation of the euro owes much to the feeling – prevalent at Bretton Woods – that exchange rates should be stable and speculation curbed. And the need to impose obligations on creditor and surplus nations is now an argument used

…

enlightened self-interest. By allowing European countries to recover, it created vast markets for US exports and prevented many countries from descending into communism. The Bretton Woods era is still seen by many people as an extraordinary success. This was undoubtedly true of continental Europe, which recovered remarkably quickly from the worst

…

period was marked by the constant industrial disputes that caused Britain to be dubbed ‘the sick man of Europe’. For their different reasons, when the Bretton Woods system did break down, Britain and America were far more ready to adopt monetarist and free-market ideas than the Europeans, for whom the social

…

as an ‘exorbitant privilege’ granted America, which could print money and receive goods in exchange. This process also created a long-term problem for the Bretton Woods system. The system required foreign countries to have faith in the dollar but it also required the US to print dollars, behaviour that weakened their

…

the value of its gold stock.11 The Europeans felt that the US should tailor its economic and financial policies to the requirements of the Bretton Woods system. That would require American politicians to subordinate domestic policies to international needs. But US presidents had to cope not only with public opinion,

…

an immensely important development in financial history since it created a financial market outside the control of governments. Capital controls had been imposed in the Bretton Woods system, but rules governing the finance of trade flows were relaxed in 1958. European exporters to the US could build up dollar balances. The

…

. The development of the Eurobond market was also an early sign of the international flows of capital that were eventually to help bring down the Bretton Woods system. Money was being transferred across borders and between currencies, and that meant it could switch out of currencies about which investors had doubts.

…

up their gold reserves, a sign that the belief in commodity money had not been eradicated. Filippo Cesarino writes that ‘central banks did not see Bretton Woods as a pure dollar standard but rather as a system hinged on the dollar’s convertibility into gold. The steady expansion of official dollar holdings

…

policies that promoted expansion, and central banks (with some exceptions such as the Bundesbank) did not counter loose fiscal policy with tighter monetary policy. The Bretton Woods system had worked very well for more than twenty years, delivering economic growth with low unemployment. Arguably, however, fixed exchange rates only played a limited

…

move with a 10 per cent surcharge on imports – a blatant attempt to force other countries to revalue their currencies. The Bretton Woods system was over. It could be argued that Bretton Woods was doomed by the attempt to combine fixed exchange rates with a full employment policy. Arguably these two aims were not

…

countries all the time. The switch to floating exchange rates in the 1970s was followed by much higher rates of unemployment than had occurred under Bretton Woods, and the monetarists were accused of being callous about the plight of the unemployed because of their obsession with inflation. Another problem was that the

…

Promises ‘Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.’ Milton Friedman With the demise of Bretton Woods, money was free of its link to gold, the ‘barbarous relic’ as Keynes had described it. In the ancient battle between creditors and debtors,

…

system to last a few years at most. Instead, it has lasted forty. The 1970s were a very turbulent decade. Apart from the abandonment of Bretton Woods, it also saw a battle between two very different visions of how economic policy should be run: Keynesianism and monetarism. The hold of Keynesianism was

…

The ‘bond market vigilantes’ would keep errant governments in line, and head off an inflationary rebound. By itself, this was a crucial difference from the Bretton Woods era. Capital controls meant that, until the late 1960s, the markets played a limited role in disciplining governments. Instead, the key role was played by

…

plenty of countries had no track record of anti-inflationary success with which to impress sceptical investors. Many developing nations accordingly tried to continue the Bretton Woods system by other means, by pegging their currency to the US dollar. In effect, they were piggybacking on the perceived strength of the world’s

…

the adjustment has not occurred. Some countries have been almost permanently in deficit; others in surplus. The US was just edging into trade deficit when Bretton Woods collapsed but it still had the advantage of the assets accumulated during the long period of post-war US strength. But by 1985, foreigners had

…

in driving short-term movements of the dollar. The US could run repeated deficits without triggering the kind of crisis that would have occurred under Bretton Woods. Inflation For investors, it makes sense for inflation to be a determining factor in currency markets. Inflation reduces the purchasing power of a currency;

…

developments which have occurred since the euro was created. The third motive was to strike a blow against international finance. In the aftermath of the Bretton Woods collapse, European countries made a number of attempts to set up managed exchange-rate systems. The first, known as the snake, was launched alongside

…

One answer would have been to adjust economic policy so as to eliminate the difference with other countries. But European nations, like the US under Bretton Woods, wanted both to run expansionary policies and to have stable currencies. A classic example was the Mitterrand government that took office in France in 1981

…

standard of living. Most of these booms end badly.’2 FORTY YEARS OF BUBBLES The last forty years of economic history (since the collapse of Bretton Woods) have been remarkable. Not only have they seen an explosion in debt and in money creation, unprecedented swings in exchange rates and the massive growth

…

profits were limitless. The mania only collapsed when it was clear that many lines lacked sufficient passengers to make them profitable. However, the end of Bretton Woods released the remaining brake on the system. There was no limit to the amount of money and credit that could be created. Countries no longer

…

a year, while the debt-to-GDP ratio has soared to more than 300%.20 To sum up, something fundamental changed after 1971, when the Bretton Woods system collapsed. Floating exchange rates allowed larger trade deficits and greater international capital movements. In turn, this allowed the financial sector to grow as a

…

are the new American oligarchy – a group that gains political power because of its economic power.’ Simon Johnson and James Kwak, 13 Bankers The post-Bretton Woods era has not just produced bubbles. It has also been accompanied by another remarkable development – the phenomenal growth of the financial sector. As we read

…

outside world for help. In the 1980s and 1990s, sovereign debt crises forced governments to turn to the International Monetary Fund. The demise of the Bretton Woods system had caused the fund to remake itself as an emergency provider of finance to the developing world. These loans often carried strict conditions that

…

European countries moved over to a welfare-state model, followed at a slower pace by the US, through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reforms. The Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates just about worked for twenty-five years, dependent on the control of capital flows and that international investors had confidence

…

convertibility was abandoned. It changed in the 1930s’ Depression as countries went off the gold standard. And it happened again in the 1970s as the Bretton Woods system collapsed. The system breaks down either because the debtors cannot, or will not, meet their obligations, or because creditors fear they are not being

…

attempt to reduce the income of creditors by cutting the bond yield.2 Creditors have been dicing with danger ever since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system. After 1971, countries were free to depreciate their currencies at will. Many duly did so. Nations also ran budget and trade deficits for

…

a medium of exchange. But before we dismiss all the ideas for reform, we should remember that the world operates under what some call a Bretton Woods II regime, with the Americans buying Chinese goods and the Chinese supplying the finance. The implication of this process is everlasting US trade deficits and

…

and outright default is almost unthinkable. But governments did manage to reduce their debt burdens after the Second World War, under the auspices of the Bretton Woods system. In a March 2011 paper, Carmen Reinhart and Belen Sbrancia argue that the success of this debt-reduction programme was down to ‘financial repression

…

more flexible exchange rate. How would such a managed exchange-rate system work? After all, it eventually proved impossible to keep exchange rates pegged under Bretton Woods. But the system did work for a quarter of a century. If an exchange-rate peg gives speculators a tempting target, the answer will be

…

system next week or next year. After the gold standard collapsed in the early 1930s, it took another decade, and a world war, before Bretton Woods was agreed. Bretton Woods collapsed in 1971, but order was not really restored to the financial system until the 1980s. However, eventually, if Chinese power grows as fast

…

the Great Depression 1919 – 1939, Oxford, 1995 and Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, Princeton, 2008. 6 Filippo Cesarino, Monetary Theory and Bretton Woods: The Construction of an International Monetary Order, Cambridge, 2006. 7 J. K. Galbraith, Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, 2nd edn, London, 1995.

…

Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression 1919 – 1939, Oxford, 1995. 9 Keynes, Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill. 10 Filippo Cesarino, Monetary Theory and Bretton Woods: The Construction of an International Monetary Order, Cambridge, 2006. 11 Richard Duncan, The Corruption of Capitalism, Hong Kong, 2009. 12 Barry Eichengreen and Peter Temin

…

Bank and Europeans the IMF. 12 Carmen Reinhart and Belen Sbrancia, ‘The Liquidation of Government Debt’, NBER Working Paper 16893, March 2011. 13 Russell Napier, ‘Bretton Woods on Speed’, CLSA research note, November 2010. Bibliography Some suggestions for further reading: Acharya, Viral and Richardson, Matthew, eds, Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair

…

in the Zero Era, London, 1996. Calder, Lendol, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of American Debt, Princeton, 1999. Cesarino, Filippo, Monetary Theory and Bretton Woods: The Construction of an International Monetary Order, Cambridge, 2006. Chapman, Meyrick, Don’t Be Fooled Again: Lessons in the Good, Bad and Unpredictable Behaviour of

…

of the South Sea Bubble, London, 1960. Davies, Glyn, A History of Money: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, Cardiff, 2002. Dormael, Armand van, Bretton Woods: Birth of a Monetary System, New York, 1978. Duncan, Richard, The Dollar Crisis, rev. edn, New York, 2005. —The Corruption of Capitalism, Hong Kong,

…

von Black Death Black Monday black swan Blackstone Blair, Tony Blum, Léon BMW Bodencreditanstalt Bohemia Bolsheviks Bonnet, Georges Bootle, Roger Brady, Nicholas Brady bonds Brazil Bretton Woods system Brodsky, Paul Brooke, Rupert Brown, Gordon Bruning, Heinrich Brutus Bryan, William Jennings bubbles budget deficits budget surplus building societies Buiter, Willem Bundesbank Burns, Arthur

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy

by Dani Rodrik  · 23 Dec 2010  · 356pp  · 103,944 words

world economy with little social and political support from those it is supposed to help. The first three decades after 1945 were governed by the Bretton Woods compromise, named after the eponymous New Hampshire resort where American, British, and other policy makers from Allied nations gathered in 1944 to design the

…

post–World War II economic system. The Bretton Woods regime was a shallow multilateralism that permitted policy makers to focus on domestic social and employment needs while enabling global trade to recover and flourish

…

state. Developing countries, for their part, were allowed to pursue their particular growth strategies with limited external restraint. International capital flows remained tightly circumscribed. The Bretton Woods compromise was a roaring success: the industrial countries recovered and became prosperous while most developing nations experienced unprecedented levels of economic growth. The world economy

…

flourished as never before. The Bretton Woods monetary regime eventually proved unsustainable as capital became internationally more mobile and as the oil shocks of the 1970s hit the advanced economies hard. This

…

in particular. But as we shall see, these were countries that chose to play the globalization game not by the new rules, but by Bretton Woods rules. Instead of opening themselves unconditionally to international trade and finance, they pursued mixed strategies with a heavy dose of state intervention to diversify their

…

agree that such an economics is possible and think better of economics (even if not of economists) by the end of this book. 4 Bretton Woods, GATT, and the WTO Trade in a Politicized World Trade policy is politically contentious because it has important domestic distributional consequences and because it generates

…

economy with a new economic philosophy and created two new international organizations: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The deal struck at Bretton Woods would govern the world economy for the first three decades following World War II. Long after the regime became undone during the 1970s and 1980s

…

, the term “Bretton Woods” would remain a wistful reminder of the possibilities of collective deliberation at the global level. Neither Keynes nor White was motivated purely by cosmopolitan considerations

…

off a staff economist to work out overnight the economic formula and justification that would produce these shares.2 Yet the agreement that emerged from Bretton Woods transcended narrow national interests and did much more than buttress American economic hegemony. A delicate compromise animated the new regime: allow enough international discipline

…

infrastructure for the international economy that would outlast their uncontested hegemony. The institutional embodiment of multilateralism in trade during the fifty years subsequent to the Bretton Woods Conference was the GATT. The GATT was only part of what was originally meant to be a more ambitious organization, the International Trade Organization (

…

certain important limits (see below). Transport costs continued to decline. And yet, policy makers displayed a decided lack of ambition in pushing for liberalization under Bretton Woods. Large parts of world trade remained either completely outside multilateral agreements or protected by generous exceptions to the existing agreements. The goal was freer trade

…

some areas, not free trade in all. What pushed globalization along instead was the background of economic growth, equity, security, and stability that the Bretton Woods compromise helped prop up. Broad-based growth facilitated globalization because it helped take the sharp edge off the distributional impacts of trade. The choppiness of

…

. Thus national policies promoted globalization mostly as a byproduct of widely shared economic growth along with some modest opening up. The success of the Bretton Woods era suggests that healthy national economies make for a bustling world economy, even in the presence of trade controls.6 Consider the long list of

…

, albeit within a loose framework of international cooperation. When trade threatened domestic distributional bargains, trade would give way. John Ruggie, the preeminent analyst of the Bretton Woods era, has called this mechanism “the compromise of embedded liberalism.” “Unlike the economic nationalism of the thirties,” Ruggie writes, the regime “would be multilateral

…

different nations doing their own thing. In that respect the institution proved spectacularly successful. Viewed this way, we begin to appreciate a key point about Bretton Woods: what purists increasingly viewed as “derogations” from the principles of free trade were in fact instances of regime maintenance. Anti-dumping duties, the MFA,

…

different understanding. Along with the onset of financial globalization around 1990, the WTO marks the pursuit of a new kind of globalization that reversed the Bretton Woods priorities: hyperglobalization. Domestic economic management was to become subservient to international trade and finance rather than the other way around. Economic globalization, the international

…

have protected poor farmers against a sudden surge of agricultural imports.14 These tensions are inherent in the aggressive push for hyperglobalization that replaced the Bretton Woods consensus and shattered Ruggie’s “embedded liberalism compromise.” Trade officials and technocrats become tone-deaf to other economic and social objectives when the pursuit

…

its own. My Harvard colleague Robert Lawrence makes a useful distinction between “shallow” and “deep” versions of global integration.15 Under shallow integration, as in Bretton Woods, the trade regime requires relatively little of domestic policy. Under deep integration, by contrast, the distinction between domestic policy and trade policy disappears; any discretionary

…

Broad-based economic growth could help diminish the tensions, but that objective would require locally tailored strategies and the requisite domestic maneuvering room, as under Bretton Woods. As Blinder indicates, we cannot take it for granted that the potential economic benefits of this new wave of globalization will accrue to the many

…

had begun to dismantle the controls they maintained over cross-border lending and borrowing, as the advanced countries themselves did following the dissolution of the Bretton Woods regime. Traditionally, domestic residents in these countries had legally not been permitted to take their money out of the country to invest in foreign

…

winning his argument. Despite resistance from many developing countries, an IMF interim committee declared that it “is time to add a new chapter to the Bretton Woods agreement.” Private capital flows had become much more important to the global economy, and the committee expressed its view that “an increasingly open and

…

trade agreements to renounce capital controls. This signaled a momentous transformation in policy beliefs. We need to return to the original Bretton Woods agreement to appreciate its full significance. The Bretton Woods Consensus on Capital Controls It would be difficult to overstate the strength of the consensus in favor of capital controls in

…

money’ varieties, will be desirable for most countries not only in the years immediately ahead but also in the long run as well.”11 The Bretton Woods arrangements fully reflected this consensus. As Keynes himself would make clear, the agreement gave every government the “explicit right to control all capital movements”

…

of the policies pursued elsewhere. This global leveling of policy was unacceptable in view of Keynes’s desire (widely shared by other architects of the Bretton Woods regime) to put domestic economic and social goals ahead of the global economy. There was an alternative to capital controls. Countries might opt for

…

trade required higher transaction costs in international finance—in other words, capital controls. Free capital mobility was out and capital controls were in. The Bretton Woods regime championed the principle that national economies needed management to ensure full employment and adequate growth. This in turn required that they have sufficient “policy

…

ounce. Even though all other countries could in principle devalue their currencies, the system relied on the United States never doing so itself. The Bretton Woods regime depended on what came to be called the “dollar-exchange standard.” What if the United States faced a conflict between its domestic requirements and

…

. This fateful decision, taken on August 15, 1971, sealed the fate of the global regime of fixed exchange rates, the monetary cornerstone of the Bretton Woods regime. Once again, the domestic economy had triumphed over the needs of the global economy. In subsequent years there were various attempts to establish new

…

currency parities, but none proved durable. The move to floating currencies was officially sanctioned in 1973. The Dissolution of the Bretton Woods Consensus The success of the Bretton Woods regime contained the seeds of its undermining. As world trade and finance expanded, the “policy space” that the existing controls afforded shrank

…

of liberalization and the benefits of capital mobility. Just as in trade, an agenda of deep integration centered on free capital mobility would replace the Bretton Woods compromise. The 1960s were the heyday of Keynesian ideas on economic management. The oil shocks and the stagflation of the 1970s—which confronted advanced

…

became orthodoxy had become heresy once again. When Financial Markets Misbehave With fixed exchange rates and capital controls gone, two key planks of the original Bretton Woods consensus had been shelved. In the years that followed, international financial markets would exert significant influence on the conduct of economic policy. At the

…

to remain stable. Britain had two major devaluations between 1945 and 1973 (in 1949 and 1967), but these were aimed at removing what in the Bretton Woods regime were called “fundamental disequilibria,” and were followed by periods of stability in foreign currency markets. The post-1973 floating experience looks like something

…

champions of the last three decades, just as those of the immediate postwar decades, were countries such as China that played the globalization game by Bretton-Woods rules rather than deep integration rules. They maintained capital controls, kept foreign finance at bay, and used their policy space for domestic economic management

…

a perfect world, and caution dictates that we not let financial markets run wild. Let us return to James Tobin, one of the earliest post–Bretton Woods advocates of capital controls within the economics establishment. Before he floated his proposal to tax international currency transactions, Tobin carefully considered the hedgehogs’ ideal

…

by national policy makers—in addition to improved international regulatory standards designed, among other things, to penalize excessive leverage. We cannot return to the Bretton Woods regime, but we can still learn a lot from that experience. The compromise that energized the world economy in the aftermath of World War II

…

difficult to diversify out of agriculture and other traditional products otherwise. China (like South Korea and Taiwan before it) played the globalization game by Bretton Woods rules rather than the post-1990 rules of deep integration. The Diversification Imperative You become what you produce. That is the inevitable fate of nations

…

up the slack. But more on this in the next chapter. The only remaining option sacrifices hyperglobalization. The Bretton Woods regime did this, which is why I have called it the Bretton Woods compromise. The Bretton Woods–GATT regime allowed countries to dance to their own tune as long as they removed a number of border

…

unprecedented economic growth rates until the late 1970s under import-substitution policies that insulated their economies from the world economy. As we saw, the Bretton Woods compromise was largely abandoned in the 1980s as the liberalization of capital flows gathered speed and trade agreements began to reach behind national borders. The

…

at the national level. More restrained forms of globalization need not embrace the assumptions inherent in deep integration. By placing limits on globalization, the Bretton Woods regime allowed the world economy and national democracies to flourish side by side. Once we accept restraints on globalization, we can in fact go one

…

narrowly technical areas and encompass broader social purposes? Yes, says John Ruggie, the Harvard scholar who coined the term “embedded liberalism” to describe the Bretton Woods regime. Ruggie agrees that transnational networks have undermined the traditional model of governance based on nation states. To right this imbalance, he argues, we need

…

. The postwar model required keeping the international economy at bay because it was built for and operated at the level of nation states. Thus the Bretton Woods– GATT regime established a “shallow” form of international economic integration, with controls on international capital flows, partial trade liberalization, and plenty of exceptions for

…

globalization while explicitly recognizing the virtues of national diversity and the centrality of national governance. What we need, in effect, is an updating of the Bretton Woods compromise for the twenty-first century. This updating must recognize the realities of the day: trade is substantially free, the genie of financial globalization

…

national institutions. Relying on nation states to provide the essential governance functions of the world economy does not mean we should abandon international rules. The Bretton Woods regime, after all, did have clear rules, even though they were limited in scope and depth. A completely decentralized free-for-all would not

…

international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national.” 2 Raymond Mikesell, The Bretton Woods Debates: A Memoir (Princeton: Princeton Dept. of Economics, International Finance Section, Essays in International Finance, no. 192, 1994). 3 John Ruggie has called this

…

Fifty-eighth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May 1946), p. 687. 12 John Maynard Keynes, “Activities 1941–1946: Shaping the Post-war World, Bretton Woods and Reparations,” in D. Moggridge, ed., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 26 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 17. 13 Abdelal,

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

…

: 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

…

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

…

“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

…

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,

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

, 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

…

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

…

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

…

. 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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

, 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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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.

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

: 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.

…

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

…

(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

…

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,”

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

, 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

…

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

…

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

…

, 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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

. 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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

. 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

…

, 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

…

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

…

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

…

: 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

…

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.

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

, 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

…

.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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

), (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

…

, (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

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power

by Michel Aglietta  · 23 Oct 2018  · 665pp  · 146,542 words

the principles, the norms and the conditions of acceptability of two international systems: namely, the gold standard, which lasted for four decades, and the Bretton Woods system, which lasted for two. We will examine the endogenous conditions for these systems’ deterioration and ultimate destruction. The lesson that can be drawn from

…

s financial institutions to continue to dominate international relations. Here, we will analyse the evolution of international monetary relations after the 1971 disappearance of the Bretton Woods system and the 1976 Jamaica Accords. We will analyse these developments as a form of degenerated system, known as the dollar semi-standard. This

…

. This historical detour should also enable us to find some bearings for the era of financial globalisation that has followed the disappearance of the Bretton Woods system. If we do not have accepted rules, is there a system or not? Does the dominant role set for the dollar in the

…

Bretton Woods system endure today? If so, how? In this era, international relations have been affected by something of an Unidentified Flying Object in the monetary landscape

…

around a rule of convertibility. This accompanied the first process of financial globalisation, before ultimately coming up against World War One. The other was the Bretton Woods system, which was a heavily institutionalised international system. Contemporaneous with the rise of the labour society, it specified the dollar as the key currency

…

fluctuation in the basic balance meant that Britain did not accumulate long-term structural debt. This was totally at odds with the US situation under Bretton Woods, and indeed in the period of the imbalances of the 1980s and 2000s. Remaining constantly in long-term surplus, Britain had short-term creditors

…

, each of which was attached to its own currency zone. This was, therefore, a three-currency system with a common means of settlement. THE BRETTON WOODS SYSTEM: COORDINATION VIA THE INSTITUTIONALISED HEGEMONY OF THE DOLLAR The end of World War Two saw new arrangements for international monetary relations inspired by the

…

procedures under the aegis of a consultation forum set up for this very purpose: the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF was created at the Bretton Woods conference as a common subsidiary of the member countries’ governments. It had three responsibilities: to be the guardian of mutually accepted rules; to provide

…

financial aid for the accepted adjustments; and to drive debates on monetary questions. The Bretton Woods accords of July 1944 came at the end of long and complex negotiations. Indeed, these talks saw a clash between two visions for the future

…

two shared convictions made possible the approach that resulted in the creation of the IMF. This was an institutional heritage that lasted even beyond the Bretton Woods system itself. The Difficult Compromise Underlying the IMF’s Creation11 At the beginning of this chapter, we saw the general obstacle that international money

…

committee for this purpose. In the end, reaching a compromise required an increase in the amount that was being shared out. The global conference at Bretton Woods was nonetheless one of a kind, in the sense that it did indeed produce results. None of the previous conferences, from Paris in 1865

…

an expression of the situation of US dominance at the end of the war. There lay the seeds for problems that would later haunt the Bretton Woods system, when the European economies’ restored competitiveness made it possible to re-establish current account convertibility from 1958 onwards. In the absence of a

…

, made monetary expansion in the rest of the world subject to monetary expansion in the United States. The Period of Preconvertibility (1947–58) The Bretton Woods system went through two periods, 1947–58 and 1958–71, separated by the re-establishment of convertibility in Europe. The first sub-period was dominated

…

of large-scale military spending in the United States gave fresh impulse to industrial production in Europe. At the end of the 1950s, the Bretton Woods system was finally in working order. It had to confront the two problems that any international monetary system must resolve if it is to be

…

and it has to assure that balances of payments are adjusted so as to balance out the offer and demand across the different currencies. The Bretton Woods system functioned in conformity with its statutes for a relatively short period, from 1958 to 1971, because it failed to deal with these two problems

…

thus proved unable to adapt to the transformations of the world economy. Global Monetary Expansion and the Triffin Dilemma The problem that would undermine the Bretton Woods system was the permanent deficit in the US capital balance. Up until the end of the 1960s, the United States maintained an average annual

…

). Figure 7.2 Global inflationary growth driven by US money creation (1958–71) Table 7.9. portrays the monetary asymmetry mechanism produced by the Bretton Woods system under US monetary hegemony. Table 7.9 Asymmetrical effect of foreign central bank intervention on foreign exchange markets Operation USA Rest of World Fed

…

+ T$ Total – – – – + T$ + RW – – It is necessary now to study the consequences of an intervention by a foreign central bank, following the rules of the Bretton Woods system. Such an intervention was expressed in an acquisition of surplus dollars on the foreign exchange market, at the prevalent exchange rate. The intervention portrayed

…

no responsibility over the private price of gold. However, speculation on gold was symptomatic of the concern over the dollar’s pivotal role in the Bretton Woods rules. Thus, the US government reacted in two ways. Firstly, in 1960, it formed a network for swaps between central banks, by means of

…

this consultation represented a failure that would ultimately sweep away the whole system. Within just four years after the devaluation of the pound sterling, the Bretton Woods system would itself disappear. Gold speculation ran riot, and the Gold Pool was left powerless to resist. It was closed in March 1968, leaving

…

the ideas in Keynes’s plan, the reform sought to construct a system of symmetrical adjustments in order to remedy the rigid aspects of the Bretton Woods system. It was necessary to develop rules that could deal with imbalances before they began to accumulate. The Americans proposed making reserves an indicator

…

did allow the IMF to take on a new role as a mentor for indebted developing countries. The true winners of the destruction of the Bretton Woods system were the international investment banks, who were able to arbitrate between currencies and throw themselves into credit distribution policies at the international level,

…

of the IMF’s adaptation to the new roles that resulted from the Jamaica Accords. Table 7.10 portrays the evolution of these roles after Bretton Woods, and the role that the IMF could have played if anything had come of the reform project studied by the C20.19 Table 7.

…

10 Development of the IMF’s roles Mutual assistance fund for currents running temporary deficits (Bretton Woods) Agency issuing an international monetary asset (C20) Financial intermediary for development (Washington Consensus) International lender of last resort (new structure) Structure of the monetary

…

Settlements (BIS). The financial cycle resulting from the new global credit dynamic has profoundly transformed the macroeconomy in relation to what it was under the Bretton Woods system. The financial cycle has a much longer duration than the decision-making horizon of market participants and policymakers. This cycle extends beyond their

…

dual problem of the international liquidity supply and the adjustment of balances of payments – an incapacity which manifested itself in the global inflation under the Bretton Woods system – took the form of a cycle in the dollar. This was a highly disruptive phenomenon that propagated the financial crisis at the global

…

level. The International Monetary System as a Dollar Semi-Standard After the fall of Bretton Woods, countries could freely choose their own exchange regimes. That meant that a country could allow its currency to float according to supply and demand,

…

self-referential logic at work within private actions. This logic emerges from the mimetic character of competing exporters’ behaviour. Even since the disappearance of the Bretton Woods system, the dollar has remained very stable as a proportion of exchange reserves over time. This illustrates the crucial importance that ultimate liquidity has for

…

IV. What is international money? A look across history has not provided the answer. From the Delian League to the international gold standard and the Bretton Woods system, there have been numerous attempts to provide greater legitimacy to arrangements between multiple currencies each legitimised by its own foundational sovereignty. Yet these attempts

…

of international exchange, as we saw with specific reference to the dollar in Chapter 7. International monetary regimes are created by voluntary associations among states. Bretton Woods was a peculiar regime that aimed to create elements of international law and international institutions (the IMF, the World Bank) distinct from the associated countries

…

countries to exporter countries. Yet this rule of international monetary circulation is violated by the international use of national currencies. As we saw with the Bretton Woods system, the total international means of payment may not line up with the needs of the international circulation of goods and services. Indeed, the

…

monetary policies (C). We can say that the IMS is coherent if countries with convertible currencies choose to situate themselves within the same diamond. The Bretton Woods system is close to the line AB (fixed exchanges), with a staggered pattern of capital controls: these are low for the United States, high

…

segment BC by accepting greater capital mobility and thus floating exchanges. The major Western countries did this in the 1970s after the disappearance of the Bretton Woods system; Japan did so in the 1980s; and China did so after 2005. The European countries also followed this trend, albeit only as a

…

if the conditions are no longer the same as those that motivated the creation of the institutions concerned. Thus, the institutions created at Bretton Woods survived beyond the Bretton Woods system itself; they adapted by developing their functions. What we still have to do is to get a sense of prospects for the

…

play a major role in making the IMF the authority that organises international monetary coordination, which it had to abandon after the disappearance of the Bretton Woods system. Since the multi-currency system is structured by monetary regions, the representation of individual eurozone countries must give way to the representation of

…

in which there is an increasingly diversified set of interdependencies, as regions previously on the edges of the international game now converge with it. Bretton Woods lasted for a quarter of a century because negotiations could make use of an institutional framework that had been legitimised by treaty. But the system

…

regime. Such a regime articulates principles, rules and procedures for maintaining permanent coordination.17 Its principles are those of multilateral exchange that emerged from the Bretton Woods framework. In the twenty-first century, these principles include the recognition of the need to produce global public goods. These principles legitimise both cooperation as

…

and supervise the channels through which financial fragility is transmitted. The IMF must rediscover its central role in international monetary governance, in the spirit of Bretton Woods. For an IMS with More Symmetrical Adjustments Transforming international monetary relations in the direction of an institutionalised cooperation framework is one of the necessary responses

…

the euro and the yuan, could expand their field of attraction if the structural problems of China and the eurozone could be properly overcome. At Bretton Woods, the United States’ political and monetary domination prevented the formation of a system able to deal with the problems of adjusting balances of payments

…

of reference current balances. This method would consist of adopting and adapting the work the C20 carried out in its abortive attempt to reform the Bretton Woods system.19 This method consists of estimating the investment requirements necessary to sustaining the capital growth compatible with the long-term trajectory of countries’

…

majority necessary to take decisions that alter the Fund’s statutes. This qualified majority level currently stands at 87.5 percent. This was calculated at Bretton Woods in order to allow the United States to arrogate a blocking-minority vote to itself, allowing it alone to veto decisions. This arrangement is

…

Economics, vol. 96, no. 2, 1981, pp. 207–222. 2 For a wide retrospective of views on the Bretton Woods system and its extensions, see the collective work edited by Thierry Walfaren, Bretton Woods. Mélanges pour un cinquantenaire, Paris: Association d’Économie Financière, 1994. 3 Michel Aglietta, La Fin des devises-clés, Paris

…

Studies in International Finance, no. 45, 1979. 11 On Keynes and White’s rival expectations and conceptions, and the difficult reconciliation that led to the Bretton Woods accords, see Michel Aglietta and Sandra Moatti, Le FMI. De l’ordre monétaire aux désordres financiers, Paris: Economica, 2000. 12 John Maynard Keynes, ‘Proposals

…

: Alternative Views and Historical Experience’, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Economic Review, January–February. Bordo, Michael and Barry Eichengreen (eds) (1993), A Retrospective on the Bretton Woods System, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Borio, Claudio (2014), ‘The financial cycle and macroeconomics: What have we learnt?’, Journal of Banking and Finance, vol.

…

et le cirque. Sociologie historique d’un pluralisme politique, Paris: Seuil. Vilar, Pierre (1974), Or et monnaie dans l’histoire, Paris: Flammarion. Walfaren, Thierry (1994), Bretton Woods. Mélanges pour un cinquantenaire, Paris: Association d’Économie Financière. Walras, Leon (2010) Elements of Pure Economics, or The Theory of Social Wealth, London: Routledge. Warnier

…

Bodin, Jean, 115 bond crisis (1994), 237 Braudel, Fernand, 83, 84, 120–1, 135, 145 Brazil crisis (1999), 243 Brender, Anton, 162n6 Breton, Stéphanie, 68 Bretton Woods system, 286, 296, 302, 311–29, 348, 350, 352–3, 386, 387, 389, 390, 391 bronze money, 98, 192 Bryan, William Jennings, 217n13 Bundesbank,

The Global Minotaur

by Yanis Varoufakis and Paul Mason  · 4 Jul 2015  · 394pp  · 85,734 words

The Social Life of Money

by Nigel Dodd  · 14 May 2014  · 700pp  · 201,953 words

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

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis

by James Rickards  · 10 Nov 2011  · 381pp  · 101,559 words

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream

by R. Christopher Whalen  · 7 Dec 2010  · 488pp  · 144,145 words

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis

by James Rickards  · 15 Nov 2016  · 354pp  · 105,322 words

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze  · 31 Jul 2018  · 1,066pp  · 273,703 words

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation

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

Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization

by Harold James  · 15 Jan 2023  · 469pp  · 137,880 words

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History

by Stephen D. King  · 22 May 2017  · 354pp  · 92,470 words

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System

by James Rickards  · 7 Apr 2014  · 466pp  · 127,728 words

Global Governance and Financial Crises

by Meghnad Desai and Yahia Said  · 12 Nov 2003

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace

by Matthew C. Klein  · 18 May 2020  · 339pp  · 95,270 words

Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

by Edward Fishman  · 25 Feb 2025  · 884pp  · 221,861 words

Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World

by Adam Lebor  · 28 May 2013  · 438pp  · 109,306 words

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas

by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau  · 3 Aug 2016  · 586pp  · 160,321 words

Globalists

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

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market

by Nicholas Wapshott  · 2 Aug 2021  · 453pp  · 122,586 words

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis

by Anatole Kaletsky  · 22 Jun 2010  · 484pp  · 136,735 words

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All

by Costas Lapavitsas  · 14 Aug 2013  · 554pp  · 158,687 words

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy

by Marc Levinson  · 31 Jul 2016  · 409pp  · 118,448 words

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy

by Philip Coggan  · 6 Feb 2020  · 524pp  · 155,947 words

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer

by Nicholas Shaxson  · 10 Oct 2018  · 482pp  · 149,351 words

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back

by Oliver Bullough  · 5 Sep 2018  · 364pp  · 112,681 words

Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government

by Paul Volcker and Christine Harper  · 30 Oct 2018  · 363pp  · 98,024 words

The City

by Tony Norfield  · 352pp  · 98,561 words

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance

by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm  · 10 May 2010  · 491pp  · 131,769 words

The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations

by Sebastian Mallaby  · 24 Apr 2006  · 605pp  · 169,366 words

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

by Niall Ferguson  · 13 Nov 2007  · 471pp  · 124,585 words

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times

by Giovanni Arrighi  · 15 Mar 2010  · 7,371pp  · 186,208 words

End the Fed

by Ron Paul  · 5 Feb 2011

EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts

by Ashoka Mody  · 7 May 2018

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War

by Benn Steil  · 13 Feb 2018  · 913pp  · 219,078 words

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics

by Robert Skidelsky  · 13 Nov 2018

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

by Edward Chancellor  · 15 Aug 2022  · 829pp  · 187,394 words

The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy

by Richard Duncan  · 2 Apr 2012  · 248pp  · 57,419 words

Empire

by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri  · 9 Mar 2000  · 1,015pp  · 170,908 words

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One

by Meghnad Desai  · 15 Feb 2015  · 270pp  · 73,485 words

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World

by Sandra Navidi  · 24 Jan 2017  · 831pp  · 98,409 words

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World

by Ian Bremmer  · 30 Apr 2012  · 234pp  · 63,149 words

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War

by Norman Stone  · 15 Feb 2010  · 851pp  · 247,711 words

The Scandal of Money

by George Gilder  · 23 Feb 2016  · 209pp  · 53,236 words

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber  · 29 Oct 2024  · 292pp  · 106,826 words

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy

by Kevin Mellyn  · 18 Jun 2012  · 183pp  · 17,571 words

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies

by Judith Stein  · 30 Apr 2010  · 497pp  · 143,175 words

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

by Paul Mason  · 29 Jul 2015  · 378pp  · 110,518 words

Rogue States

by Noam Chomsky  · 9 Jul 2015

Money Free and Unfree

by George A. Selgin  · 14 Jun 2017  · 454pp  · 134,482 words

The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America

by Mehrsa Baradaran  · 7 May 2024  · 470pp  · 158,007 words

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives)

by David Birch  · 14 Jun 2017  · 275pp  · 84,980 words

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist

by Alex Zevin  · 12 Nov 2019  · 767pp  · 208,933 words

USA Travel Guide

by Lonely, Planet

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens

by Nicholas Shaxson  · 11 Apr 2011  · 429pp  · 120,332 words

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy

by Mervyn King  · 3 Mar 2016  · 464pp  · 139,088 words

Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns

by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton  · 3 Feb 2002  · 353pp  · 148,895 words

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy

by Stephanie Kelton  · 8 Jun 2020  · 338pp  · 104,684 words

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition

by Kindleberger, Charles P. and Robert Z., Aliber  · 9 Aug 2011

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in a Global Market

by Steven Drobny  · 31 Mar 2006  · 385pp  · 128,358 words

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom

by Martin Jacques  · 12 Nov 2009  · 859pp  · 204,092 words

Eastern USA

by Lonely Planet

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable

by James Owen Weatherall  · 2 Jan 2013  · 338pp  · 106,936 words

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

by Laurence C. Smith  · 22 Sep 2010  · 421pp  · 120,332 words

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics

by Nicholas Wapshott  · 10 Oct 2011  · 494pp  · 132,975 words

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order

by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey  · 27 Jan 2015  · 457pp  · 128,838 words

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

by Saifedean Ammous  · 23 Mar 2018  · 571pp  · 106,255 words

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics

by Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce  · 5 Jun 2018  · 215pp  · 64,460 words

The Future of Money

by Bernard Lietaer  · 28 Apr 2013

Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice

by Molly Scott Cato  · 16 Dec 2008

Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms

by Russell Napier  · 18 Jan 2016  · 358pp  · 119,272 words

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony

by David G. W. Birch  · 14 Apr 2020  · 247pp  · 60,543 words

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas

by Janek Wasserman  · 23 Sep 2019  · 470pp  · 130,269 words

Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI

by John Cassidy  · 12 May 2025  · 774pp  · 238,244 words

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible

by William N. Goetzmann  · 11 Apr 2016  · 695pp  · 194,693 words

Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History

by Milton Friedman  · 1 Jan 1992  · 275pp  · 82,640 words

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline

by Russell Jones  · 15 Jan 2023  · 463pp  · 140,499 words

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration

by Kent E. Calder  · 28 Apr 2019

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa

by Dambisa Moyo  · 17 Mar 2009  · 225pp  · 61,388 words

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown

by Philip Mirowski  · 24 Jun 2013  · 662pp  · 180,546 words

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit

by William Keegan  · 24 Jan 2019  · 309pp  · 85,584 words

America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy

by Robert B. Zoellick  · 3 Aug 2020

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis

by Jeanna Smialek  · 27 Feb 2023  · 601pp  · 135,202 words

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire

by Wikileaks  · 24 Aug 2015  · 708pp  · 176,708 words

The Cold War: A World History

by Odd Arne Westad  · 4 Sep 2017  · 846pp  · 250,145 words

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis

by Martin Wolf  · 24 Nov 2015  · 524pp  · 143,993 words

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards

by Antti Ilmanen  · 4 Apr 2011  · 1,088pp  · 228,743 words

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy

by Peter Temin  · 17 Mar 2017  · 273pp  · 87,159 words

Propaganda and the Public Mind

by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian  · 31 Mar 2015

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State

by Paul Tucker  · 21 Apr 2018  · 920pp  · 233,102 words

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan

by Sebastian Mallaby  · 10 Oct 2016  · 1,242pp  · 317,903 words

Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies

by Nik Bhatia  · 18 Jan 2021

Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

by Wolfgang Streeck  · 1 Jan 2013  · 353pp  · 81,436 words

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

by William Easterly  · 4 Mar 2014  · 483pp  · 134,377 words

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea

by Mark Blyth  · 24 Apr 2013  · 576pp  · 105,655 words

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril

by Satyajit Das  · 9 Feb 2016  · 327pp  · 90,542 words

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk

by Satyajit Das  · 14 Oct 2011  · 741pp  · 179,454 words

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism

by William Baker and Addison Wiggin  · 2 Nov 2009  · 444pp  · 151,136 words

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption

by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins  · 1 Jan 2006  · 497pp  · 123,718 words

The Money Machine: How the City Works

by Philip Coggan  · 1 Jul 2009  · 253pp  · 79,214 words

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017

by Ian Kershaw  · 29 Aug 2018  · 736pp  · 233,366 words

Panderer to Power

by Frederick Sheehan  · 21 Oct 2009  · 435pp  · 127,403 words

Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry  · 1 Jan 2008  · 362pp  · 95,782 words

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism

by Joyce Appleby  · 22 Dec 2009  · 540pp  · 168,921 words

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank

by John Tamny  · 30 Apr 2016  · 268pp  · 74,724 words

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity

by Stephen D. King  · 14 Jun 2010  · 561pp  · 87,892 words

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000

by John Steele Gordon  · 12 Oct 2009  · 519pp  · 148,131 words

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy

by Dani Rodrik  · 8 Oct 2017  · 322pp  · 87,181 words

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets

by Peter Oppenheimer  · 3 May 2020  · 333pp  · 76,990 words

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order

by Rush Doshi  · 24 Jun 2021  · 816pp  · 191,889 words

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

by Liaquat Ahamed  · 22 Jan 2009  · 708pp  · 196,859 words

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing

by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane  · 28 Feb 2017  · 346pp  · 90,371 words

Hopes and Prospects

by Noam Chomsky  · 1 Jan 2009

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The

by Mariana Mazzucato  · 25 Apr 2018  · 457pp  · 125,329 words

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt

by Russell Napier  · 19 Jul 2021  · 511pp  · 151,359 words

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance

by Eswar S. Prasad  · 27 Sep 2021  · 661pp  · 185,701 words

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover

by Katrina Vanden Heuvel and William Greider  · 9 Jan 2009  · 278pp  · 82,069 words

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present

by Jeff Madrick  · 11 Jun 2012  · 840pp  · 202,245 words

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy

by Diane Coyle  · 29 Oct 1998  · 49,604 words

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales From the World of Wall Street

by John Brooks  · 6 Jul 2014  · 452pp  · 150,785 words

Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet

by Ian Hanington  · 13 May 2012  · 258pp  · 77,601 words

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means

by John Lanchester  · 5 Oct 2014  · 261pp  · 86,905 words

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney  · 7 Mar 2017  · 526pp  · 160,601 words

The Left Case Against the EU

by Costas Lapavitsas  · 17 Dec 2018  · 221pp  · 46,396 words

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth

by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato  · 31 Jul 2016  · 370pp  · 102,823 words

The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Coming Currency Crisis With Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments

by Charles Goyette  · 29 Oct 2009  · 287pp  · 81,970 words

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science

by Dani Rodrik  · 12 Oct 2015  · 226pp  · 59,080 words

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis

by Kevin Mellyn  · 30 Sep 2009  · 225pp  · 11,355 words

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance

by Ron Chernow  · 1 Jan 1990  · 1,335pp  · 336,772 words

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy

by Sasha Issenberg  · 1 Jan 2007  · 534pp  · 15,752 words

The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class

by Kees Van der Pijl  · 2 Jun 2014  · 572pp  · 134,335 words

How the World Works

by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman and David Barsamian  · 13 Sep 2011  · 489pp  · 111,305 words

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay

by Guy Standing  · 13 Jul 2016  · 443pp  · 98,113 words

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism

by David Harvey  · 1 Jan 2010  · 369pp  · 94,588 words

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It

by Owen Jones  · 3 Sep 2014  · 388pp  · 125,472 words

Understanding Power

by Noam Chomsky  · 26 Jul 2010

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community

by David C. Korten  · 1 Jan 2001

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages

by Carlota Pérez  · 1 Jan 2002

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order

by Richard Haass  · 10 Jan 2017  · 286pp  · 82,970 words

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

by David Talbot  · 5 Sep 2016  · 891pp  · 253,901 words

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite

by Sebastian Mallaby  · 9 Jun 2010  · 584pp  · 187,436 words

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession

by Peter L. Bernstein  · 1 Jan 2000  · 497pp  · 153,755 words

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

by Ha-Joon Chang  · 26 Dec 2007  · 334pp  · 98,950 words

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism

by Kevin Phillips  · 31 Mar 2008  · 422pp  · 113,830 words

Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)

by Rachel Slade  · 9 Jan 2024  · 392pp  · 106,044 words

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

by Grace Blakeley  · 11 Mar 2024  · 371pp  · 137,268 words

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment

by Noam Chomsky  · 15 Mar 2010  · 258pp  · 63,367 words

Water: A Biography

by Giulio Boccaletti  · 13 Sep 2021  · 485pp  · 133,655 words

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity

by Ha-Joon Chang  · 4 Jul 2007  · 347pp  · 99,317 words

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire

by Neil Irwin  · 4 Apr 2013  · 597pp  · 172,130 words

Capitalism in America: A History

by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan  · 15 Oct 2018  · 585pp  · 151,239 words

The Curse of Cash

by Kenneth S Rogoff  · 29 Aug 2016  · 361pp  · 97,787 words

The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970

by John Darwin  · 23 Sep 2009

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions

by Jason Hickel  · 3 May 2017  · 332pp  · 106,197 words

China's Good War

by Rana Mitter

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away

by Doug Henwood  · 9 May 2005  · 306pp  · 78,893 words

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990

by Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds  · 24 Aug 2016  · 627pp  · 127,613 words

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class

by Jeff Faux  · 16 May 2012  · 364pp  · 99,613 words

Born in Flames

by Bench Ansfield  · 15 Aug 2025  · 366pp  · 138,787 words

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott  · 9 May 2016  · 515pp  · 126,820 words

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work

by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams  · 1 Oct 2015  · 357pp  · 95,986 words

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom

by Doug Henwood  · 30 Aug 1998  · 586pp  · 159,901 words

Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed

by Andrew Jackson (economist) and Ben Dyson (economist)  · 15 Nov 2012  · 363pp  · 107,817 words

Year 501

by Noam Chomsky  · 19 Jan 2016

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?

by John Kay  · 2 Sep 2015  · 478pp  · 126,416 words

Winds of Change

by Peter Hennessy  · 27 Aug 2019  · 891pp  · 220,950 words

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems

by Linda Yueh  · 4 Jun 2018  · 453pp  · 117,893 words

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy

by David Hale and Lyric Hughes Hale  · 23 May 2011  · 397pp  · 112,034 words

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

by Phil Thornton  · 7 May 2014

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All

by Martin Sandbu  · 15 Jun 2020  · 322pp  · 84,580 words

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made

by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas  · 28 Feb 2012  · 1,150pp  · 338,839 words

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader

by Colin Lancaster  · 3 May 2021  · 245pp  · 75,397 words

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity

by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.  · 24 Sep 2019  · 242pp  · 71,943 words

Investing Amid Low Expected Returns: Making the Most When Markets Offer the Least

by Antti Ilmanen  · 24 Feb 2022

A Brief History of Neoliberalism

by David Harvey  · 2 Jan 1995  · 318pp  · 85,824 words

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide

by Ha-Joon Chang  · 26 May 2014  · 385pp  · 111,807 words

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism

by Grace Blakeley  · 14 Oct 2020  · 82pp  · 24,150 words

Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems

by Didier Sornette  · 18 Nov 2002  · 442pp  · 39,064 words

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization

by Michael O’sullivan  · 28 May 2019  · 756pp  · 120,818 words

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks

by Ann Pettifor  · 27 Mar 2017  · 182pp  · 53,802 words

The Economic Weapon

by Nicholas Mulder  · 15 Mar 2021

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel

by Kim Stanley Robinson  · 5 Oct 2020  · 583pp  · 182,990 words

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life

by Richard Beck  · 2 Sep 2024  · 715pp  · 212,449 words

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets

by John Plender  · 27 Jul 2015  · 355pp  · 92,571 words

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy

by Benjamin Barber  · 20 Apr 2010  · 454pp  · 139,350 words

Adam Smith: Father of Economics

by Jesse Norman  · 30 Jun 2018

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000

by Paul Kennedy  · 15 Jan 1989  · 1,477pp  · 311,310 words

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future

by Jeff Booth  · 14 Jan 2020  · 180pp  · 55,805 words

That Used to Be Us

by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum  · 1 Sep 2011  · 441pp  · 136,954 words

Rigged Money: Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game

by Lee Munson  · 6 Dec 2011  · 236pp  · 77,735 words

Europe: A History

by Norman Davies  · 1 Jan 1996

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture

by David Boyle and Andrew Simms  · 14 Jun 2009  · 207pp  · 86,639 words

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed.

by Patricia Schultz  · 13 May 2007  · 2,323pp  · 550,739 words

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better

by Annie Leonard  · 22 Feb 2011  · 538pp  · 138,544 words

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?

by Brett Christophers  · 17 Nov 2020  · 614pp  · 168,545 words

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein  · 17 Mar 2009  · 1,037pp  · 294,916 words

Who Rules the World?

by Noam Chomsky

Buffett

by Roger Lowenstein  · 24 Jul 2013  · 612pp  · 179,328 words

The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham

by Joe Carlen  · 14 Apr 2012  · 398pp  · 111,333 words

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles

by William Quinn and John D. Turner  · 5 Aug 2020  · 297pp  · 108,353 words

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind

by Jan Lucassen  · 26 Jul 2021  · 869pp  · 239,167 words

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity

by Robert Albritton  · 31 Mar 2009  · 273pp  · 93,419 words

How Will Capitalism End?

by Wolfgang Streeck  · 8 Nov 2016  · 424pp  · 115,035 words

Unhappy Union: How the Euro Crisis - and Europe - Can Be Fixed

by John Peet, Anton La Guardia and The Economist  · 15 Feb 2014  · 267pp  · 74,296 words

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes

by Mark Skousen  · 22 Dec 2006  · 330pp  · 77,729 words

Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom

by van K. Tharp  · 1 Jan 1998

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed

by Robert Skidelsky  · 3 Mar 2020  · 290pp  · 76,216 words

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

by J. Bradford Delong  · 6 Apr 2020  · 593pp  · 183,240 words

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

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

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less

by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou  · 15 Feb 2015  · 400pp  · 88,647 words

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

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

Money: The Unauthorized Biography

by Felix Martin  · 5 Jun 2013  · 357pp  · 110,017 words

State of Emergency: The Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook  · 29 Sep 2010  · 932pp  · 307,785 words

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis

by Benjamin Kunkel  · 11 Mar 2014  · 142pp  · 45,733 words

Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order

by Noam Chomsky  · 6 Sep 2011

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century

by Torben Iversen and David Soskice  · 5 Feb 2019  · 550pp  · 124,073 words

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman  · 23 Sep 2013  · 579pp  · 164,339 words

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy

by George Magnus  · 10 Sep 2018  · 371pp  · 98,534 words

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities

by Benjamin R. Barber  · 5 Nov 2013  · 501pp  · 145,943 words

Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America)

by Louis Hyman  · 3 Jan 2011

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science

by Paul Krugman  · 18 Feb 2010  · 162pp  · 51,473 words

Where Does Money Come From?: A Guide to the UK Monetary & Banking System

by Josh Ryan-Collins, Tony Greenham, Richard Werner and Andrew Jackson  · 14 Apr 2012

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets

by Andy Kessler  · 13 Jun 2005  · 218pp  · 63,471 words

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society

by Will Hutton  · 30 Sep 2010  · 543pp  · 147,357 words

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

by Jeremy Lent  · 22 May 2017  · 789pp  · 207,744 words

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party

by David Kogan  · 17 Apr 2019  · 458pp  · 136,405 words

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

by Douglas Rushkoff  · 1 Jun 2009  · 422pp  · 131,666 words

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber  · 1 Jan 2010  · 725pp  · 221,514 words

A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr  · 2 Jul 2009  · 872pp  · 259,208 words

Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence

by Jonathan Haslam  · 21 Sep 2015  · 525pp  · 131,496 words

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind

by Raghuram Rajan  · 26 Feb 2019  · 596pp  · 163,682 words

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today

by Linda Yueh  · 15 Mar 2018  · 374pp  · 113,126 words

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right

by Philippe Legrain  · 22 Apr 2014  · 497pp  · 150,205 words

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It

by Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan  · 15 Mar 2014  · 414pp  · 101,285 words

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall

by Michael Meyer  · 7 Sep 2009  · 323pp  · 95,188 words

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It

by Yascha Mounk  · 15 Feb 2018  · 497pp  · 123,778 words

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)

by Charles Wheelan  · 18 Apr 2010  · 386pp  · 122,595 words

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century

by Christian Caryl  · 30 Oct 2012  · 780pp  · 168,782 words

On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System

by Henry M. Paulson  · 15 Sep 2010  · 468pp  · 145,998 words

How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite

by Richard R. Lindsey and Barry Schachter  · 30 Jun 2007

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Eighth Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers

by Kate L. Turabian  · 14 Apr 2007  · 863pp  · 159,091 words

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money

by Steven Drobny  · 18 Mar 2010  · 537pp  · 144,318 words

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies

by Jeremy Siegel  · 7 Jan 2014  · 517pp  · 139,477 words

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century

by Rodrigo Aguilera  · 10 Mar 2020  · 356pp  · 106,161 words

When Things Start to Think

by Neil A. Gershenfeld  · 15 Feb 1999  · 238pp  · 46 words

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities

by John Cassidy  · 10 Nov 2009  · 545pp  · 137,789 words

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common

by Alan Greenspan  · 14 Jun 2007

Planet of Slums

by Mike Davis  · 1 Mar 2006  · 232pp

Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the US and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East

by James Barr  · 8 Aug 2018  · 539pp  · 151,425 words

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

by David Gerard  · 23 Jul 2017  · 309pp  · 54,839 words

The Post-American World: Release 2.0

by Fareed Zakaria  · 1 Jan 2008  · 344pp  · 93,858 words

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

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

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

by Peter L. Bernstein  · 23 Aug 1996  · 415pp  · 125,089 words

Birth of the Euro

by Otmar Issing  · 20 Oct 2008  · 276pp  · 82,603 words

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

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

Understanding Asset Allocation: An Intuitive Approach to Maximizing Your Portfolio

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

Milton Friedman: A Biography

by Lanny Ebenstein  · 23 Jan 2007  · 298pp  · 95,668 words

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

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

Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

by Adom Getachew  · 5 Feb 2019

The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis

by Tim Lee, Jamie Lee and Kevin Coldiron  · 13 Dec 2019  · 241pp  · 81,805 words

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals

by Oliver Bullough  · 10 Mar 2022  · 257pp  · 80,698 words

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

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

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement

by David Graeber  · 13 Aug 2012  · 284pp  · 92,387 words

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe

by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Alex Hyde-White  · 24 Oct 2016  · 515pp  · 142,354 words

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

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

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

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

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them

by Nouriel Roubini  · 17 Oct 2022  · 328pp  · 96,678 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

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri  · 1 Jan 2004  · 475pp  · 149,310 words

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization

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

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

by Azeem Azhar  · 6 Sep 2021  · 447pp  · 111,991 words

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy

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

How Asia Works

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

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

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities

by Vaclav Smil  · 23 Sep 2019

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

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

Global Financial Crisis

by Noah Berlatsky  · 19 Feb 2010

Bureaucracy

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

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

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

A Short History of Progress

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

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

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

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community

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

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy

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

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Capitalism: A Ghost Story

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

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989

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

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

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

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

by David Rothkopf  · 18 Mar 2008  · 535pp  · 158,863 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 Art of Corporate Success: The Story of Schlumberger

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

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405

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

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

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

Half In, Half Out: Prime Ministers on Europe

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

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

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

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

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan  · 9 Apr 2018

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

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

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

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

End This Depression Now!

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

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

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

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

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

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History

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

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

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

It's Our Turn to Eat

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

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

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

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business

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

Automation and the Future of Work

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

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

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

Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality

by Vito Tanzi  · 28 Dec 2017

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance

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

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

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

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

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

Hedgehogging

by Barton Biggs  · 3 Jan 2005

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

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

Greater: Britain After the Storm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Unknown  · 7 Jun 2012

India's Long Road

by Vijay Joshi  · 21 Feb 2017

Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round

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

1946: The Making of the Modern World

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

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

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

How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes

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

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

by Francis Fukuyama  · 27 Aug 2007

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory

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

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

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

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India

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

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

by Francis Fukuyama  · 7 Apr 2004

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

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

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

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

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

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

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

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

Powers and Prospects

by Noam Chomsky  · 16 Sep 2015

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

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

The Retreat of Western Liberalism

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

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

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

Fully Automated Luxury Communism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Debt Crises

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

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

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

Culture and Imperialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China's Superbank

by Henry Sanderson and Michael Forsythe  · 26 Sep 2012

Market Wizards: Interviews With Top Traders

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

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age

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

Hawai'I Becalmed: Economic Lessons of the 1990s

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

Why Government Is the Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culture of Terrorism

by Noam Chomsky  · 19 Oct 2015

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 New Prophets of Capital

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

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

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

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You

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

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

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

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

Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin

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

The Global Money Markets

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

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

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