The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Council on Foreign Relations Books (Princeton University Press))

by Benn Steil

It

was this dynamic of ceaseless change...

stability that was held to underlie the prewa...

he assumption that the capital exports benefit both the country and the world at large is not unassailable,” was typical of his sober conclusions.

S]ome measure of intelligent control of the volume and direction of foreign investments is desirable….

The ramifications of exporting a large portion of a country’s savings are too complex, and the consequences too important to permit the continuance of capital exports without making some attempt at evaluating ...

am also learning Russian in the hope that I may get a fellowship which would enable me to spend a year chiefly in Russia. There I should like to study intensively the technique of planning at the Institute of Economic Investigation of Gosplan.

White telegraphed his acceptance two days later—“

“Selection of a Monetary Standard for the US,” clearly

suggests that its author had no intention of getting sidetracked with

f...

is...

He now wanted to make, not just shape, policy at the highest level, and he was not about to let the opportunity afforded ...

The stabilizing influence exerted by the interdependence of nations is not likely in the future, however, to be so

great as it has been in the past.

White concluded that any new monetary standard would have to have “promotion of trade and finance” as a key criterion, but that it

would also have to allow “sovereignty in shaping domestic policies.”

Under the gold standard, exchange rates were fixed, so that the balance of payments had to adjust through domestic deflation.

White therefore wanted to rewrite the rules of the American monetary system

to give a revamped Federal Reserve far more discretionary powers than the gold standard could accommodate, and then convince the rest of the world to help make such a new system stick internationally.

the world signed on much later only when it became clear that the system served to boost both local and global commerce.

But

1934, the world was mired in depression. U.S. gross domestic product was 28 percent lower than it had been at the start of the decade.17 Trade had plummeted 29 perc...

White argued that U.S...

recovery demanded trade expansion opportunities for American business, and that such expansion in turn required a new model for international monetary stabilization. This was to be White’s bedrock position as his re...

Such imperialism, he charges, “urges the U.S. to make [the] most of our financial domination and military strength and become the most powerful nation in the world.”

As White pursued U.S. global financial domination with a zeal not witnessed before or since in the Treasury,

it is more than curious that he should here express objection to using such domination to “become the most powerful nation in the world.”...

States to share power? The essay is clear. Ha...

His attack on an unidentified “Catholic hierarchy”