economics · July 1944

Bretton Woods, 1944: Everyone Wants a Deal, Nobody Wants the Same One

Forty-four allied nations agreed the interwar monetary chaos must never return. The fight was over whose version of order would become the world's focal point.

Facts drawn from official conference records and central-bank historical archives; figures from period sources are labeled.

In July 1944, with the war still being fought, 730 delegates from 44 allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to design the postwar monetary order [VERIFIED]. The shared premise was burned into everyone present: the interwar collapse into competitive devaluation, currency blocs, and strangled trade must not be repeated, and almost any coherent common system would beat none.

Two blueprints competed. Keynes proposed an international clearing union with a new supranational unit of account, the bancor, and symmetric pressure on creditor countries to adjust, a design that would have cushioned debtor nations like postwar Britain. White's plan built a fund of contributed currencies, with voting weighted by contribution and the dollar at the center, a design the United States could control and its Congress could plausibly ratify. Britain arrived intellectually formidable and financially broke; the creditor's plan prevailed on architecture, and the bargaining moved to terms inside it.

Play the same structure: The Conference Room at Bretton Woods.