From Bretton Woods to World Inflation

Henry Hazlitt was a leading editorialist for the New York Times from 1934 until 1946. But his career at the paper abruptly ended because of the articles collected in this book.

He wrote that the Bretton Woods attempt to fix exchange rates and peg world currencies to the dollar, which in turn was fixed to gold, would not and could not last.

Hazlitt saw that this was not a real gold standard but a complete fake. He said that this was not a viable system, and he predicted its complete breakdown in time. He said that the result of trusting governments and tying their fates together would be inflation and the collapse of what remained of sound money.

Instead, he urged that every country be responsible for the soundness of its own currency. Only that system would produce stability over time.

It's hard to imagine that such truth-telling thoughts on monetary systems would have appeared as New York Times editorials – not op-eds but the actual editorial position of the paper itself.

Sadly, it didn't last. Tremendous pressure was applied to the New York Times to stop opposing the agreement. Hazlitt would not give in. In the end, he was pushed out, and the paper reversed its stance.

But who was right? Hazlitt, of course!

At the suggestion of Hazlitt himself, this book was put together by George Koether, who worked in the archives for months to gather all the documentation of how this great journalist of liberty went about his work. It includes a detailed narration by Koether himself.

Hazlitt finishes the book’s epilogue with an intriguing suggestion: "We could of course return to a merely private gold standard, but this is likely to happen only by default, when the paper dollar has become worthless, and millions of Americans have been ruined."