The Bretton Woods consensus prioritized domestic full employment over capital mobility

Evidence

When a new international economic order for the postwar period was crafted at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, the agreement was based on a widely held consensus that rejected both the gold standard and free-floating exchange rates in favor of a prioritization of domestic policy goals—most importantly full employment—and the need for widespread capital controls. The mainstream rejection of the two options discussed by the neoliberals demonstrates how far their views were from the economic consensus in the mid-twentieth century and is thus worth explaining at some length. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 416

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Capital controls were embedded in the Bretton Woods IMF framework — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 448; Fixed exchange rates trade employment stability for external balance — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 295; Neoliberal ‘freedom’ prioritized cross-border capital mobility over domestic welfare. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 423 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal ‘freedom’ prioritized cross-border capital mobility over domestic welfare. #contradicts (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 423
• The gold standard rigidly subordinated domestic welfare policies to fixed exchange rates #contradicts (0.78) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 414
• Bretton Woods institutionalized the monetary nationalism Hayek had attacked since the 1930s #expands (0.78) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 424
• Fixed exchange rates trade employment stability for external balance #expands (0.75) — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 295
• Postwar Labour settlement redistributed wealth via Keynesian economic measures #exemplifies (0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1059
• The US imposed the dollar at Bretton Woods, killing Keynes’s clearing union #complicates (0.75) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 1016
• Financialization responds to worker and anti-colonial resistance by making capital more mobile #expands (0.72) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 501
• Floating exchange rates preconditioned the rapid liberalization of global capital #qualifies (0.70) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 448