The Battle of Bretton Woods Quotes

“The Bretton Woods saga unfurled at a unique crossroads in modern history. An ascendant anticolonial superpower, the United States, used its economic leverage over an insolvent allied imperial power, Great Britain, to set the terms by which the latter would cede its dwindling dominion over the rules and norms of foreign trade and finance. Britain cooperated because the overriding aim of survival seemed to dictate the course. The monetary architecture that Harry White designed, and powered through an international gathering of dollar-starved allies, ultimately fell, its critics agree, of its own contradictions.”
― Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order

“The drama of the final collapse of the gold-exchange standard would poison Anglo-American relations for decades. To the British way of thinking, Britain had been ignominiously forced off gold by selfish and short-sighted American and French policies: the Americans with their abominable import tariffs, and the French with their wretched devaluations. The Americans, for their part, saw themselves as innocent victims of an odious British default.”
― Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Council on Foreign Relations Books

“President Herbert Hoover had tried to preserve the gold standard by means of trade restrictions; Roosevelt maneuvered in the other direction, moving away from multilateralism in money while trying to preserve it in trade.”
― Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Council on Foreign Relations Books

“The fraying relic of the gold-exchange standard that remained at the end of the 1920s had collapsed entirely by 1934. Britain, its inspiration and foundation in the nineteenth century, abandoned it with great reluctance and bitterness in September 1931. Twenty-five nations followed in short order. The United States refused to throw in the towel until April 1933, shortly after Roosevelt took office.”
― Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Council on Foreign Relations Books

“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.”
― Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Council on Foreign Relations Books

“Under the gold standard, exchange rates were fixed, so that the balance of payments had to adjust through domestic deflation. White, like Keynes, concluded that it should be the other way around. “I believe there is definitive evidence,” White wrote, “that alterations in the domestic price level are far more costly to the nation than frequent alterations in the exchange rate would be.” The United States “would be courting trouble to place ourselves in a position similar to that which we found ourselves between 1929 and 1933,” a period of persistent deflation.”
― Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Council on Foreign Relations Books

“The years 1880–1913 constitute the great era of laissez-faire in world economic history—the reign of the classical gold standard, in which governments around the globe had allowed an unprecedented degree of economic activity within and between their nations to be regulated by the market-driven transfer of gold claims across borders (the physical stuff itself just shifted around in central bank vaults). The year 1933, in stark contrast, saw the world mired in the Great Depression, with the gold standard in tatters, trade decimated, and unemployment at previously unimagined levels.”
― Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Council on Foreign Relations Books