Britain, Bretton Woods, and the Almighty Dollar

The Second World War brought about many epochal changes, among them a complete reworking of the international financial system. It was at the founding of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 that the world formally recognised a practical truth: the undisputed status of the US dollar as the international reserve currency. This moment is often viewed as the ascendancy of the US as the world’s monetary leader at the expense of Britain. How steeped in irony, then, is the little-known fact that the US has a British economist to thank for the greenback’s coronation.