The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Unabridged)
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
When turmoil strikes world monetary and financial markets, leaders invariably call for "a new Bretton Woods" to prevent catastrophic economic disorder and defuse political conflict. The name of the remote New Hampshire town where representatives of 44 nations gathered in July 1944, in the midst of the century's second great war, has become shorthand for enlightened globalization. The actual story surrounding the historic Bretton Woods accords, however, is full of startling drama, intrigue, and rivalry, which are vividly brought to life in Benn Steil's epic account.
Upending the conventional wisdom that Bretton Woods was the product of an amiable Anglo-American collaboration, Steil shows that it was in reality part of a much more ambitious geopolitical agenda hatched within President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Treasury and aimed at eliminating Britain as an economic and political rival. At the heart of the drama were the antipodal characters of John Maynard Keynes, the renowned and revolutionary British economist, and Harry Dexter White, the dogged, self-made American technocrat. Bringing to bear new and striking archival evidence, Steil offers the most compelling portrait yet of the complex and controversial figure of White - the architect of the dollar's privileged place in the Bretton Woods monetary system, who also, very privately, admired Soviet economic planning and engaged in clandestine communications with Soviet intelligence officials and agents over many years.
A remarkably deft work of storytelling that reveals how the blueprint for the postwar economic order was actually drawn, The Battle of Bretton Woods is destined to become a classic of economic and political history.
Customer Reviews
Author does not connect all of the dots. Still great.
This book is so hyper-critical to why things are so bad now, I can’t express its seminal essence words that can be typed into a review. Here, in one book, covering a few short years, and the gyrations of a mostly forgotten financial conference, are all the seeds of leftist destruction of America and the West in service of the Soviets. The author covers the scores of Soviet spies that had infiltrated the FDR White House and how they influenced almost every wrong step FDR followed (there are so many I can’t attribute them all to the Soviets, sometimes he was just an idiot). From the undermining of allies to the setting up the U.S. for war with Japan, the insidious hand of Stalin is revealed.
However, the author refuses to assert Communist direction when there wasn’t documentary evidence he could find. He suggests that H.D.White’s actions at Bretton Woods were simply “patriotic,” because he backed the dollar over gold; and he doesn’t have proof of anything else. This is naive, I suggest. If I’m walking along a pier, lined with buildings, separated by gaps, and through each and every gap I see tall ocean breakers are moving toward the beach; I don’t then assume that the water is flat or moving in the opposite direction, when I’m looking at buildings blocking the surf. Instead, I assume that the same motion continues, even though I can’t see it. At Bretton Woods, White wasn’t playing the American card, he was setting up the bankruptcy of the British and the devaluation of the dollar (which succeeded in 1971). These weren't accidents, he was playing the same Soviet card he always played. He was battering the British because the Soviets feared their opposition after the war. They were the only intact power in Europe. While the eventual collapse of the dollar was supposed to launch the Soviets to world dominance. Only he was wrong about Socialism, so after the 71 Nixon Shock, the U.S. has set out on a Black Swan of deficits and devaluations. That wasn’t an accident, it was more of the same from Harry Dexter White. He was a Soviet Charlie McCarty, enjoying the Red hand up his backside controlling his every move and utterance.
Still, despite that legally-inspired oversight, this is the book that proves FDR and his clan were traitors and nothing more. Bravo.
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