Bretton Wood Monetary Conference

William R. Clark, Petrodollar warfare, 2005                                 [ ]

p.18 (pdf 39)

Bretton Wood Monetary Conferences of 1944-1945

A plaque erected at the original conference site in Carroll, New Hampshire, states: 

In 1944 the United States government chose the Mount Washington HOtel as the site for a gathering of representatives of 44 countries.  This was to be the famed Bretton Wood Monetary Conference.  The Conference established the World Bank, set the gold standard at $35 an ounce, and chose the American dollar as the backbone of international exchange.  The meeting provided the world with badly needed post war currency stability. 

p.18 (pdf 39)

Hence, it was the Bretton Woods Conferences that created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to facilitate this noble goal.  These two organizations were later instrumental in rebuilding both the European and Japanese infrastructures. 

   (Petrodollar warfare : oil, Iraq and the future of the dollar, William R. Clark, 2005, )

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Howard W. French., Everything under the heavens : how the past help shape China's push for global power, 2017. 

p.279

a German economist at Bretton Woods institution in Washington remarked to me, 

p.279

to create a new global or regional economic and political institutional arrangements 

United States, World Bank in 1944; 

Japan, Asian Development Bank in 1966; 

Germany, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1991; 

China, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank [in 2015 - operational]

   (Everything under the heavens : how the past help shape China's push for global power / Howard W. French., first edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2017] |

China──foreign relations──21st century.| China──foreign relations──Asia.|Asia──foreign relations──China.|strategic culture──China.|geopolitics──Asia., LCC JZ1734.F74  2017| DDC 327.51──dc23, https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021957, 2017, )

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Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its discontents revisited, 2018, 2002 

p.xxxv

   There was a ready solution:  the creation of a global reserve system.  China, Russia, and France supported such a system, and the UN voted to have it studied.23  But the United States opposed such a system, or even the study of its feasibility ── after all, under current arrangements, the United States could borrow from others at an interest rates close to zero, and they liked this.  Given U.S. opposition, nothing happened.34 

p.108

liberalization of capital markets (the elimination of the rules and regulations in many developing countries that are designed to stabilize the flows of volatile money into and out of the country). 

UN development program or the UN conference on trade and development (UNCTAD). 

p.109

UN monetary and financial conference at Bretton woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944

The proper name of the World Bank ── the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development ── reflects its original mission: the last part, “development”, was added almost as an afterthought.  

pp.120-121

On my first day, February 13, 1997, as chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank, as I walked into its gigantic, modern, gleaming main building on 19th Street in Washington, DC, the institution's motto was the first thing that caught my eye:  Our dream is a world without poverty.  In the center of the 13-story atrium there is a statue of a young boy leading an old blind man, a memorial to the eradication of river blindness (onchocerciasis).  Before the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and others pooled their efforts, thousands were blinded annually in Africa from this preventable disease.  Across the street stands another gleaming monument to public wealth, the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund. 

   These two institutions, often confused in the public mind, present marked contrasts that underline the differences in their cultures, styles, and mission:  one is devoted to eradicating poverty, one to maintaining global stability.  While both have teams of economists flying into developing countries for three-week missions, the World Bank has worked hard to make sure that a substantial fraction of its staff live permanently in the country they are trying to assist; the IMF generally has only a single “resident representative”, whose powers are limited.  

p.121

IMF programs are typically dictated from Washington, and shaped by the short mission during which its staff members pore over numbers in the finance ministries and central banks and make themselves comfortable in five-star hotels in the capitals.  There is more than symbolism in this difference:  one cannot come to learn about, and love, a nation unless one gets out to the countryside.  One should not see unemployment as just a statistic, an economic “body count”, the unintended casualties in the fight against inflation or to ensure that Western banks get repaid.  The unemployed are people, with families, whose lives are affected ── sometimes devastated ── by the economic policies that outsiders recommend, and, in the case of the IMF, effectively impose. 

p.121

Modern high-tech warfare is designed to remove physical contact:  dropping bombs from 50,000 feet ensures that one does not 

“feel” what one does.  Modern economic management is similar:  from one's luxury hotel, one can callously impose policies about which one would think twice if one knew the people whose lives one was destroying. 

p.122

What could I do to bring to reality the dream of a world without poverty?

How could I embark on the more modest dream of a world with less poverty?

p.122

I knew the tasks were difficult, but I never dreamed that one of the major obstacles the developing countries faced was man-made, totally unnecessary, and lay right across the street ── at my “sister” institution, the IMF. 

p.122

I had expected that not everyone in the international financial institutions or the governments that supported them was committed to the goal of eliminating poverty; but I thought there would be an open debate about strategies ── strategies which in so many areas seem to be failing, and especially failing the poor.  In this, I was to be disappointed. 

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its discontents revisited, 2018, 2002 

also by Joseph E. Stiglitz

  The euro : how a common currency threatens the future of europe 

  Rewriting the rules of american economy: an agenda for growth and shared prosperity 

  The great divide: unequal societies and what can we do about them

  Creating a learning society : a new approach to growth, development, and social progress (with Bruce C. Greenwald)

  The price of inequality: how today's divided society endangers our future 

  Freefall: america, free markets, and the sinking of the world economy

  The three trillion dollar war: the true cost of the Iraq conflict (with Linda J. Bilmes)  

  Making globalization work

  Fair trade for all : how trade can promote development (with Andrew Charlton)

  The roaring nineties : a new history of the world's most prosperous decade

  Globalization and its discontents 

  

  

  Globalization and its discontents (GAÏD)

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