The US imposed the dollar at Bretton Woods, killing Keynes’s clearing union

Evidence

Note that these two levies are in the spirit of the International Clearing Union (based on a currency called the Bancor, instead of my Kosmos) proposed by John Maynard Keynes at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which established the post-war financial system – a proposal that was unceremoniously ditched by the United States’s representative who, predictably, imposed the US dollar at the centre of global finance. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 1016

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to modern calls for a new Bretton Woods and de-dollarization debates; echoes the system’s founding injustice. — connects to: The Bretton Woods consensus prioritized domestic full employment over capital mobility — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 416; Bretton Woods institutionalized the monetary nationalism Hayek had attacked since the 1930s — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 424; Vietnam and Great Society spending cost America its trade surplus and killed Bretton Woods — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 172
• QUESTION: What would global finance look like if Keynes’s Bancor had won the argument?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 1016