What We Can Learn From Bretton Woods

Seventy-three years ago today, 44 nations descended on Bretton Woods in the White Mountains of New Hampshire for a conference on the future of the global financial system. In the Gilded Age, the area's stately Mount Washington Hotel was a preferred summer destination for robber barons and presidents alike. Now at the height of World War II, the resort—which had almost shuttered during the Great Depression—would take its place in history. Three weeks after the landings at Normandy, a galaxy of finance ministers, central bankers, and economists assembled for to make sure the economic seeds of war were never planted again.After the experience of two global conflagrations, the atrocities of Nazism, and the trauma of the Great Depression, a widely-held belief was that significant flaws in the international economic order lay at the heart of the conflict. From the post-World War I hyperinflation that ravaged Germany and Austria to unfettered protectionism and competitive “beggar-thy-neighbor” currency devaluations, the misery of political upheaval and world war had arisen from the nationalist free-for-all that was the interwar period. Fatigued, battered, and wizened, a generation of leaders sought to pave a better way.