Bretton Woods and the Money Conference of Nineteen Forty-Four

In July of nineteen forty-four, while the Second World War still raged, this remote hotel in the New Hampshire mountains became the birthplace of the modern global economy. From the first to the twenty-second of July, seven hundred thirty delegates from all forty-four Allied nations gathered here for what was formally called the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, though the world remembers it simply as Bretton Woods. The remoteness was the point.

Leaders wanted a place that was secure, secluded, and beautiful, far from the pressures of any capital city. Two towering figures dominated the talks, the brilliant British economist John Maynard Keynes and the American Treasury official Harry Dexter White, and the final agreement was a compromise between their competing plans. Out of this hotel came two institutions that still shape the world, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The delegates also created what became known as the Bretton Woods system, in which the United States dollar was fixed to gold at thirty-five dollars an ounce, and every other major currency was pegged to the dollar. That framework governed international finance for a generation. It finally came apart in August of nineteen seventy-one, when President Nixon ended the dollar's convertibility to gold, and by nineteen seventy-three the world had moved to floating exchange rates.

But it began here, in a mountain resort, with delegates hammering out the rules of money by lamplight.