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by Benn Steil

Pub Date: Feb. 24th, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-691-14909-7
Publisher: Princeton Univ.

The director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations revisits the 1944 conference that created âthe new global monetary architectureâ for the postwar world.

As the American Army entered Rome and the Russians drove the Nazis out of Minsk, delegates from 44 Allied nations gathered in Bretton Woods, N.H., to hammer out the ground rules for international economic equilibrium following the defeat of the Axis powers. The American delegation, led by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and his right-hand man for international affairs, Harry Dexter White, pressed for a âNew Deal for a new world,â looking to strengthen government control of monetary policy and central banking and to install the dollar as the âworldâs sole surrogate for gold.â The war-shattered British, mindful of their historic prerogatives, opposed the White plan, but their only leverage lay in the intellectual brilliance of John Maynard Keynes, the 20th centuryâs most influential economist, and the possibility that they might simply walk away and, thereby, cripple any agreement. Steil (co-author,Â Money, Markets, and Sovereignty, 2009, etc.) sets the stage for this contest between the cuttingly eloquent Keynes and the acerbic, technocratic Whiteâneither man tailored for diplomacyâwith especially deft potted biographies of each and a look at the infighting between the U.S. State and Treasury departments in the lead-up to the conference. For general readers, the author masterfully translates the arcana of competing theories of monetary policy, and a final chapter explains how, while some of the institutions created by Bretton Woods endureâthe World Bank, the International Monetary Fundâmany of the conferenceâs assumptions were swiftly overtaken by the Marshall Plan. Throughout Steilâs sharp discussion runs the intriguing subplot of Whiteâs career-long, secret relationship with Soviet intelligence.

A vivid, highly informed portrayal of the personalities, politics and policies dominating âthe most important international gathering since the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.â