Bretton Woods

Bretton Woods evokes the efforts, particularly by the United States and Britain, to rebuild a functioning international monetary order to offer a serious and stable institutional framework to the world economy after the end of World War II. In July 1944, exponents against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan met at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire. On the negotiating table were issues that are still relevant today. To understand what the Bretton Woods Conference has meant requires one to start from the economic conditions of the major countries of the world at the turn of the war, after the difficult years following the 1929 crisis and the dissolution of a stable international monetary order. A first step in this analysis calls for a ...