The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order

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Princeton University Press, 2013 M02 11 - 464 páginas

A sweeping history of the drama, intrigue, and rivalry behind the creation of the postwar economic order

When turmoil strikes world monetary and financial markets, leaders invariably call for 'a new Bretton Woods' to prevent catastrophic economic disorder and defuse political conflict. The name of the remote New Hampshire town where representatives of forty-four nations gathered in July 1944, in the midst of the century's second great war, has become shorthand for enlightened globalization. The actual story surrounding the historic Bretton Woods accords, however, is full of startling drama, intrigue, and rivalry, which are vividly brought to life in Benn Steil's epic account.

Upending the conventional wisdom that Bretton Woods was the product of an amiable Anglo-American collaboration, Steil shows that it was in reality part of a much more ambitious geopolitical agenda hatched within President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Treasury and aimed at eliminating Britain as an economic and political rival. At the heart of the drama were the antipodal characters of John Maynard Keynes, the renowned and revolutionary British economist, and Harry Dexter White, the dogged, self-made American technocrat. Bringing to bear new and striking archival evidence, Steil offers the most compelling portrait yet of the complex and controversial figure of White—the architect of the dollar's privileged place in the Bretton Woods monetary system, who also, very privately, admired Soviet economic planning and engaged in clandestine communications with Soviet intelligence officials and agents over many years.

A remarkably deft work of storytelling that reveals how the blueprint for the postwar economic order was actually drawn, The Battle of Bretton Woods is destined to become a classic of economic and political history.

 

Contenido

Introduction
1
The World Comes to the White Mountains
9
The Improbable Rise of Harry White
17
Maynard Keynes and the Monetary Menace
61
The Most Unsordid Act
99
The BestLaid Plans of White and Keynes
125
Whitewash
155
History Is Made
201
Out with the Old Order In with the New
293
Epilogue
330
Appendix 1 Harry Dexter White Manuscript Photos
349
Appendix 2 Statement of Harry S Truman on Harry Dexter White 1953
351
Cast of Characters
355
Notes
371
References
407
Index
427

Begging Like Fala
251

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Benn Steil is senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. His previous book, Money, Markets, and Sovereignty, was awarded the 2010 Hayek Book Prize.

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