Benn Steil's The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry PDF

When turmoil moves international financial and monetary markets, leaders always demand 'a new Bretton Woods' to avoid catastrophic financial affliction and defuse political clash. The identify of the distant New Hampshire city the place representatives of forty-four international locations accrued in July 1944, in the middle of the century's moment nice warfare, has develop into shorthand for enlightened globalization. the particular tale surrounding the ancient Bretton Woods accords, in spite of the fact that, is filled with startling drama, intrigue, and competition, that are vividly delivered to lifestyles in Benn Steil's epic account.

Upending the normal knowledge that Bretton Woods used to be the made of an amiable Anglo-American collaboration, Steil indicates that it was once in truth a part of a way more formidable geopolitical time table hatched inside President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Treasury and geared toward taking away Britain as an monetary and political rival. on the middle of the drama have been the antipodal characters of John Maynard Keynes, the well known and innovative British economist, and Harry Dexter White, the dogged, self-made American technocrat. Bringing to endure new and impressive archival proof, Steil deals the main compelling portrait but of the advanced and debatable determine of White--the architect of the dollar's privileged position within the Bretton Woods financial approach, who additionally, very privately, famous Soviet monetary making plans and engaged in clandestine communications with Soviet intelligence officers and brokers over many years.

A remarkably deft paintings of storytelling that unearths how the blueprint for the postwar monetary order used to be truly drawn, The conflict of Bretton Woods is destined to develop into a vintage of monetary and political history.