steve on Nostr: “The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the ...
“The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order” by Benn Steil
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I, for one, always associated the British economist J.M. Keynes as the ideological source of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement which essentially established the US dollar as the global reserve currency. Boy, was I wrong. Steil—an economic historian trained at Oxford and UPenn— sets the record straight with this history of the conference in New Hampshire that created the globalized economy we live in to this day. Steil shows that it was not Keynes, but rather Harry White, who was the driving force behind Bretton Woods. White was a mediocre academic and secret Soviet informant who found public service as a means to gain the notoriety he had failed to achieve elsewhere in his career. White orchestrated the outcome of Bretton Woods to establish dollar hegemony, the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank. History shows that he was proven disastrously wrong with the official de-pegging of the dollar from gold in 1971 and the subsequent period of inflationary fiat money we still live under today. As much as I still disagree with Keynesian economics, this book taught me that it’s in fact White who can be blamed for the inflationary monetary policy we now live under. Next time you’re at the grocery store feeling your savings being devalued by the hidden tax of inflation, give a subtle nod to White, whose misinformed ideas and coercive politics got us where we are today. 📉💵
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I, for one, always associated the British economist J.M. Keynes as the ideological source of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement which essentially established the US dollar as the global reserve currency. Boy, was I wrong. Steil—an economic historian trained at Oxford and UPenn— sets the record straight with this history of the conference in New Hampshire that created the globalized economy we live in to this day. Steil shows that it was not Keynes, but rather Harry White, who was the driving force behind Bretton Woods. White was a mediocre academic and secret Soviet informant who found public service as a means to gain the notoriety he had failed to achieve elsewhere in his career. White orchestrated the outcome of Bretton Woods to establish dollar hegemony, the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank. History shows that he was proven disastrously wrong with the official de-pegging of the dollar from gold in 1971 and the subsequent period of inflationary fiat money we still live under today. As much as I still disagree with Keynesian economics, this book taught me that it’s in fact White who can be blamed for the inflationary monetary policy we now live under. Next time you’re at the grocery store feeling your savings being devalued by the hidden tax of inflation, give a subtle nod to White, whose misinformed ideas and coercive politics got us where we are today. 📉💵