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So here I am at the 75th anniversary of the famous 1944 Bretton Woods conference to determine the post WW2 global monetary architecture. Some takeaways 
It’s been presented as an allied attempt (44 countries) to avoid the beggar-thy-neighbour 1930s policies that led to WW2. And to some extent it succeeded. But at some cost. It was fundamentally an exercise in establishing American hegemony in global finance. It succeeded.
The Americans got their way on almost everything. A global financial structure designed by them. IMF and World Bank based in DC. Beginning of the end of the Sterling area, dimunition of UK influence.
Keynes, head of UK delegation, was pretty useless. Tho greatest economist of his age, he rubbed everybody up the wrong way, lost most of the arguments and was overshadowed by Harry Dexter website, the working class son of Lithuanian immigrants and head of US delegation.
UK was desperate for a loan. US imposed stringent conditions. Wall Street bankers, wary of the Bretton Woods desire to create IMF, offered UK $5bn without political conditions. Under Keynes’ influence we turned down, took US government loans which ensured demise of our influence
Bretton Woods was huge success for US (and Dexter White). And huge failure for UK (and Keynes). Yet it was over a decade before it was really implemented. World Bank was meant to do post-war reconstruction. But US had to restort to Marshall plan instead.
Dexter White such a hero that post-war Truman wanted to make him head of IMF. FBI’s Hoover said no, he’s a commie. Truman backed down but thought it was just Hoover’s McCarthyism.
In the last few years Ben Stiels’s superb “Battle of Bretton Woods” establishes beyond doubt, based on 13,000 previously classified intercepts, that Dexter White was indeed a Soviet agent. Keynes was seen off by a Commie spy. End of.
