New Book By Eric Helleiner - Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods, Int. Dev. & Making of Postwar Order

Professor Helleiner is an astounding international political economist and economic historian. His archival research is impressive, and his explications and understandings of international finance are not only lucid and prolific, but extensively articulate & eloquent. His new book on Bretton Woods, like many of his other works, is certainly a tour de force.

Eric Helleiner's new book provides a powerful corrective to conventional accounts of the negotiations at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. These negotiations resulted in the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—the key international financial institutions of the postwar global economic order. Critics of Bretton Woods have argued that its architects devoted little attention to international development issues or the concerns of poorer countries. On the basis of extensive historical research and access to new archival sources, Helleiner challenges these assumptions, providing a major reinterpretation that will interest all those concerned with the politics and history of the global economy, North-South relations, and international development. The Bretton Woods architects—who included many officials and analysts from poorer regions of the world—discussed innovative proposals that anticipated more contemporary debates about how to reconcile the existing liberal global economic order with the development aspirations of emerging powers such as India, China, and Brazil. Alongside the much-studied Anglo-American relationship was an overlooked but pioneering North-South dialogue. Helleiner’s unconventional history brings to light not only these forgotten foundations of the Bretton Woods system but also their subsequent neglect after World War II.

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Amato and Fantacci on reforming international money

New Cambridge Journal of Economics paper by Massimo Amato and Luca Fantacci.

From the abstract:

In the face of the current crisis, there is growing demand for regulation, often invoked in terms of a ‘return to Bretton Woods’. The Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 was indeed the last explicit attempt to define a rule for international settlements. In fact, post-World War II currency negotiations gave place to a confrontation between two alternative visions of the international monetary system. The two plans set forth by the U.S. and by the U.K. embody two alternative principles: the first aims at producing international liquidity on the basis of a reserve currency (White’s plan for an International Stabilization Fund); the second aims at providing a pure means and measure for the multilateral clearing of current accounts in the form of a currency unit (Keynes’s plan for an International Clearing Union). The former has undoubtedly prevailed. However, it is questionable whether it is the most appropriate way to manage global imbalances. Indeed, the principle eventually embodied in the Bretton Woods system, and persisting even after its demise, tends to identify money with a reserve asset, making possible, and even necessary, the accumulation of global imbalances, despite original intentions to reabsorb them. On the contrary, the principle that inspired the alternative plan was intended to deprive money of the character of a reserve asset, thus making it the rule for international exchanges, rather than an object of regulation among others. This paper outlines the two principles both in historical perspective and in the perspective of future reforms, particularly in relation to the recent proposal by the governor of the People’s Bank of China to go back to the principles of the Keynes plan.

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