1 gen 1944 anni - Bretton Woods economic conference establishes World Bank and Internaional Monetary Fund (IMF)

Descrizione:

Bretton woods: An international conference in New Hampshire in July 1944 that established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).


World Bank: An international bank created to provide loans for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe as well as for the development of former colonized nations.

IMF: A fund established to stabilize currencies and provide a predictable monetary environment for trade, with the U.S. dollar serving as the benchmark.



The economic foundation of American global supremacy rested partly on the institutions created at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944. With the United States and Britain taking the lead, hundreds of delegates from the forty-four Allied countries gathered to plan a postwar financial order. The summit led to the creation of the World Bank, which provided loans for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe (separate from the direct aid of the Marshall Plan, which came in 1948) as well as for the economic development of previously colonized nations. The same meeting produced plans for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), formally launched in 1945, which would stabilize national currencies and provide a predictable monetary environment for trade, with the U.S. dollar serving as the benchmark.

These two entities became the cornerstones of the Bretton Woods system, premised on loaning American capital, at low interest to countries that adopted free-trade capitalist economies. In 1947, the first General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) bolstered Bretton Woods by creating an international framework for overseeing trade rules and practices. Together these agreements served the American vision of an open-market global economy and complemented the nation’s ambitious diplomatic aims in the Cold War. Many critics held that Bretton Woods favored the United States at the expense of recently independent countries, because the United States could dictate lending and trading terms and stood to benefit as nations purchased more American goods. Indeed, the system was far from equitable, but it did provide much-needed economic order.

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