The Architects of Money — How 730 Delegates in a Crumbling Hotel Redesigned the World's Financial Future
The pot roast was getting cold.
In a split-level house in suburban Cleveland, on the evening of August 15, 1971, the Hennessey family gathered around their television. The Cartwrights were riding across the Ponderosa. Then, at precisely nine o'clock, the screen went dark—and Richard Nixon appeared to announce something about gold.
What none of them knew was that the system governing international finance, the architecture constructed by exhausted delegates from forty-four nations in 1944, had just been destroyed in their living room.
This is the story of Bretton Woods—the three weeks in July 1944 when 730 delegates worked through the night in a faded New Hampshire hotel to create a monetary system they believed would save the world from destroying itself again. And the story of how that system died, twenty-seven years later, killed by a single word: "temporarily."
Follow two brilliant rivals—John Maynard Keynes, dying and working himself into the grave for a vision he couldn't quite achieve, and Harry Dexter White, the American who outmaneuvered him while possibly spying for the Soviets. Watch them design competing systems in the darkest days of World War II.
See the gold standard that preceded it, the chaos that followed when it collapsed, and the monsters that emerged from the chaos. See the new system built on American gold and American promises—and see those promises broken when the cost became too high.
The word "temporarily" is still hanging in the air. Fifty-three years later, we still haven't gone back. This is the story of how money works, why it stopped working, and what replaced it—or rather, the non-system that replaced it, the chaos we've accepted as normal because we've never known anything else.