Bretton Woods 1944: How 44 Nations Made the Dollar King

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In July 1944, a month after Normandy, delegates from 44 Allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire to redesign the world's money. They were haunted by the 1930s, when unpayable war debts, competitive devaluations, and hostile trade blocs helped set the stage for war. This episode recounts the duel at the center of the conference, between Britain's John Maynard Keynes, who wanted a shared world currency called the bancor, and America's Harry Dexter White, who wanted a limited stabilization fund.

White won because the United States held two-thirds of the world's gold. The dollar was fixed at 35 dollars an ounce, every other currency was pegged to the dollar, and the IMF and World Bank were created to manage the system. It worked for a generation, then turned on itself. Supplying the world with dollars meant printing more than the gold could cover, a trap Robert Triffin identified in 1960. On August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon closed the gold window and the age of fiat money began.

• Keynes proposed charging interest on trade surpluses so that creditor nations would have to import from, invest in, or give to debtor states.
• The Soviet Union attended but refused to ratify the agreement, calling the new institutions branches of Wall Street.
• A postwar dollar shortage froze trade until the Marshall Plan of 1948 sent Europe aid largely as grants, not loans.
• The London Gold Pool, an effort by the US and seven European nations to hold gold at 35 dollars, collapsed in March 1968, and by 1970 gold covered just 22 percent of dollars, down from 55.
• The Smithsonian Agreement tried a new peg of 38 dollars an ounce in December 1971, but major currencies were floating by 1973 and the Jamaica Accords made it official in 1976.