Abstract

The Bretton Woods international monetary system is all too easily romanticized. There is the high drama of an international conference in the leafy resort town of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire over three weeks in the summer of 1944. There is the compelling tale of two great minds, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, crossing intellectual swords over the shape of the postwar monetary world. There is the romantic assertion that the establishment of the Bretton Woods System inaugurated an era of international monetary and financial stability the likes of which the world has never seen before or since, and in so doing gave birth to a golden quarter-century of economic growth.