Bretton Woods Creates the Post-War Financial Order

In July 1944, 730 delegates from 44 Allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to design the post-war international monetary system. The conference, dominated by the competing visions of John Maynard Keynes (Britain) and Harry Dexter White (United States), established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to promote exchange rate stability and the World Bank to fund reconstruction. Currencies were pegged to the U.S. dollar, which was convertible to gold at $35 per ounce — making the dollar the world's reserve currency. The Bretton Woods system provided the stable monetary framework for the postwar economic boom. It collapsed in 1971 when Nixon ended dollar-gold convertibility, but the institutions it created — the IMF, World Bank, and dollar dominance — endure to this day.