Bretton Woods

The 1944 Bretton Woods conference and the resulting international monetary system that established fixed exchange rates pegged to the US dollar, created the IMF and World Bank, and instituted postwar capital controls. The claims discuss how this system institutionalized monetary nationalism, was later dismantled (collapsed) amid the rise of neoliberalism, and reflected American power over Keynes’s rival proposals.

Claims that use this term

• Neoliberals were ready accomplices in Bretton Woods’ collapse
• Bretton Woods achieved the densest capital controls in capitalist history.
• Bretton Woods institutionalized the monetary nationalism Hayek had attacked since the 1930s
• The US imposed the dollar at Bretton Woods, killing Keynes’s clearing union