Entenda Bretton Woods

What was decided at the Bretton Woods summit Jun 30th 2014, 23:50 by Buttonwood
ON JULY 1ST 1944 the rich world’s finance experts convened in a hotel in the New Hampshire mountains to discuss the post-war monetary system. The Bretton Woods system that emerged from the conference saw the creation of two global institutions that still play important roles today, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. It also instituted a fixed exchange-rate system that lasted until the early 1970s. A key motivation for participants at the conference was a sense that the inter-war financial system had been chaotic, seeing the collapse of the gold standard, the Great Depression and the rise of protectionism. Henry Morgenthau, America's Treasury secretary, declared that the conference should “do away with the economic evils—the competitive devaluation and destructive impediments to trade—which preceded the present war.” But the conference had to bridge a tricky transatlantic divide. Its intellectual leader was John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, but the financial power belonged to Harry Dexter White, acting as American President Roosevelt’s representative. - See more at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/06/economist-explains-20#sthash.YyZukeWA.dpuf