These two plans were reconciled at Bretton Woods to create the International Monetary Fund (IMF). White’s fund would lend dollars-and, potentially, other convertible currencies or gold-to debtor nations, but on tighter terms than were envisaged by Keynes. For three years, White had been working on his own plan for an International Stabilization Fund that would steady foreign exchange rates by persuading countries to peg their currencies to the US dollar, while pegging the value of the dollar to a fixed price for gold. Although he was hardly known outside Washington, White was a brilliant, Harvard-trained economist who was empowered and completely trusted by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., in turn a close friend and trusted adviser of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On the other side, representing the ascendant power of the United States, was an obscure Treasury Department official named Harry Dexter White. For several years, he had been refining his plan to create an International Currency Union, a kind of global central bank that would create its own money (“Bancor”) to lend to indebted countries like Britain so they could import more goods than they were able to export in the lean postwar years. On one side, representing the declining power of Great Britain, was Lord Keynes, the most famous economist in the world and an unpaid adviser to the UK Treasury.

Two men dominated the planning for Bretton Woods and the negotiations at the conference. In the words of the most famous of the attendees, John Maynard Keynes, their efforts could create a world in which “the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase.” But first they had to overcome deep divisions rooted in national interests. Their expressed goals were not just economic the delegates were convinced that the success of the Bretton Woods conference would ensure world peace as well as prosperity. Three weeks after the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy, delegates from forty-four Allied countries gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel to devise institutions meant to foster multilateral cooperation, financial stability and postwar economic reconstruction. The modern world economy materialized in the mountain air of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944.

Dexture battle vs