Fascinating Find
by digby
Students of economic history are in for a treat. An official studying deep in the bowels of the US Treasury library has recently uncovered a prize of truly startling proportions – an 800 page plus transcript of the Bretton Woods conference in July 1944, the meeting of nations which established the foundations of today’s international monetary system.
Bizarrely, this extraordiary manuscript has never before come to light… All previous accounts of Bretton Woods have been second hand, with historians apparently completely unaware that a full, and one must presume faithful, transcript of proceedings, had been taken.
Those who have seen it say it is hard to point to any outright revelation about the talks, in which for Britain, the economist John Maynard Keynes was a leading player. But the level of intellectual debate is said to have been extraordinarily impressive, with exactly the same arguments as to voting rights and undue Western influence at the IMF and World Bank as exist today. The Indian delagation is said to have been particularly outspoken, despite the fact that India was still then a colony of the UK.
I’ll be interested to see if they all spent as much time exchanging compliments and trying to be comedians as the Federal Reserve meeting transcripts do.
Considering that the economics profession is, to put it kindly, in a sate of crisis and austerity policies have been all the vogue, this should be especially interesting to Paul Krugman who has been beating this drum like he’s the reincarnation of Keith Moon for the past four years:
It was at Bretton Woods that Keynes identified one of the key problems at the heart of international economics – that imbalances in trade are next to impossible to resolve in a fixed exchange rate system without surplus countries accepting that they have as much of an obligation to do something about them as the offending deficit countries. As the eurozone is demonstrating all over again, the lessons have plainly not been learned.
.