A Long Time in Finance: the Bretton Woods System
Together with Ed Conway, Neil and Jonathan look at why a 1944 summit to discuss the economic future of the world ultimately failed.
In the summer of 1944, as Allied armies fought through Normandy, 44 nations gathered at a run-down hotel in New Hampshire to discuss the economic future of the world. What followed was the only ever formal attempt to reorder the international monetary system; one that seemed for a time successful until it collapsed unmourned in 1971.
Together with the author Ed Conway, Neil and Jonathan look at the summit itself, the giant figures who dominated it (John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White), what it concluded and why, ultimately, it failed.