According to the economic history books, the one great conference that resolved [global economic] tension – for a quarter century – was "Bretton Woods," a convocation of 44 countries in the White Mountains of New Hampshire less than a month after D-Day and the beginning of the end for the axis powers in World War II. What would the post-war world economy look like? That was the question in July of 1944. The answers were a loosely dollar-based world currency regime, the International Monetary Fund and what was to become the World Bank. So, do we need another Bretton Woods today? Benn Steil, editor of the scholarly journal "International Finance," has written a book that ponders this and other questions: "The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order." Paul Volcker has called it "full of lessons relevant today." Alan Greenspan said it's "a must-read work of economic and diplomatic history" and The New York Times wrote that "it should become the gold standard on its topic." – PBS
Dominant Social Theme: We will build on the success of Bretton Woods with a new one.
Free-Market Analysis: The drums pound and a new global monetary pact moves closer. This is how it works way up in the rarified air of Big Money where top globalists dwell.
This article is bylined by Benn Steil of the Council on Foreign Relations, a prime globalist facility. The groundwork is apparently being prepared. The plan has evidently always been a global currency. And it is marching closer.
The world is in a mess and surely the post-Bretton Woods system is responsible for it. One hundred and fifty central banks now administer the world's money, many under the supervision of the mysterious Bank for International Settlements.
Whatever goes on in the world financially is a product of what has gone before. With money stuff controlled the marketplace itself is organized and directed. This is simple logic. The free market exists from a production standpoint but not from a demand standpoint.
Modern industrial demand is ultimately generated by printed money (assuming demand is there to begin with). Not enough – high interest rates, short and long – and demand subsides and businesses close. Too much money and a boom is created that can turn into a bust, and inevitably does.
It is a central banking world and will remain that way until the system breaks down under the weight of its own internal contradictions. But those in charge will not wait.
The mainstream media and political action may be used to justify a new global convocation.
Here's more:
One strange and fascinating legacy of the 1940s that lives on at the IMF today is one which no one present at Bretton Woods could ever have imagined. My archival research uncovered some remarkable new evidence that the Fund's architect, Harry White, despite being a staunch American monetary nationalist, was a passionate believer in the success of Soviet socialist economics, and was bitterly critical of what he saw as western hypocrisy towards Soviet Russia. President Truman was certainly unaware of this when he nominated White to be the first American executive director of the IMF in 1946. He was also on the verge of nominating him to be the first head (managing director) of the Fund when he received a long memorandum from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover warning him not to. Hoover charged that White was actually a Soviet spy ...
Bretton Woods was truly a fascinating saga, but it was most surely not the triumph of economic thinking and international comity it is often painted to be. An ascendant anti-colonial superpower, the United States, used its economic leverage over an insolvent allied imperial power, Great Britain, to set the terms by which the latter would cede its dwindling dominion over the rules and norms of foreign trade and finance. Britain cooperated because the overriding aim of survival seemed to dictate the course.
The monetary architecture that Harry White designed, and powered through an international gathering of dollar- starved allies, ultimately fell of its own contradictions: The United States could not simultaneously keep the world adequately supplied with dollars and sustain the large gold reserves required by its gold-convertibility commitment. The IMF, the institution through which it was launched, though, endures -- however much its objectives have metamorphosed -- and many hope that it can be a catalyst for a new and more enduring "Bretton Woods."
Yet history suggests that a new cooperative monetary architecture will not emerge until the United States, the world's largest creditor nation in the 1940s, but now the world's largest debtor, and China, today's dominant creditor nation, each comes to the conclusion that the consequences of muddling on, without the prospect of correcting the endemic imbalances between them, are too great. Even more daunting are the requirements for building an enduring system; monetary nationalism was the downfall of the last great effort in 1944.
We can see from this what many critics of Bretton Woods have already pointed out – it was an exercise in quasi-Marxist economics. There is no reason to believe an upcoming conference would be any better.
The same people who organized Bretton Woods are apparently planning the next one.
Whether the world will accept this sort of globalized planning in the 21st century remains to be seen. The first one was implemented after the world had been exhausted by a massive war.
Are people miserable enough yet? The Western world is in what seems to be a kind of planned depression. Presumably there was a reason for the current breakdown.
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Problem, solution.
We believe this is a kind of dominant social theme – that the world is in the midst of a catastrophe and needs a new global order to counteract what cannot otherwise be cured.
Those at the top that created the catastrophe now they want to provide a radical, global solution. There are even hints as to the how the conference may be organized, with a sudden partnership organized between China and the US.
China has been made out to be the West's "enemy" – a formidable adversary. Is a phony rapprochement in the offing?
Is this entire economic scenario a kind of directed history?
Conclusion: There are rumors swirling around the G7. Let us watch and wait ...
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