Astral Codex Ten

Bretton Woods

4 min read

Bretton Woods

Article

Bretton Woods is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 03, 2021 and May 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “Breaking Bretton Woods took the finger out of the dyke”; “the great powers came together at Bretton Woods to design a new financial system”; “ABHoN doesn’t give any reason for the failure of Bretton Woods”. It most often appears alongside Argentina, Britain, China.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: March 03, 2021
  • Last seen: May 21, 2021

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For March
March 03, 2021 · Original source
2: Elizabeth (AcesoUnderGlass) on what she learned by studying the recession of 1973. “My best guess is that something was going wrong in the US and world economy well before 1971, but the market was not being allowed to adjust. Breaking Bretton Woods took the finger out of the dyke and everything fluctuated wildly for a few years until the world reached a new equilibrium.”
Inline links: studying the recession of 1973
Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
May 04, 2021 · Original source
Then the global economic system blipped. As usual, economists will debate the exact causes forever. But the basic story is: after World War II, the great powers came together at Bretton Woods to design a new financial system. The US, as leader of the free world, dictated the terms: all global currencies would be pegged to the dollar, which in turn would be pegged to gold. This heavily favored the US, and the US pressed its advantage to get two decades of stellar growth and fund all those government programs and concessions to public sector unions. But the harder the US pressed, the more stress it placed on Bretton Woods, until finally in 1971 it collapsed under the strain and the global economy flailed around, confused.
The first thesis is mostly implicit. ABHoN doesn't give any reason for the failure of Bretton Woods and the 1970s economic crisis. It mostly takes it as a given, interesting only insofar as plutocrats used it as an excuse for pushing neoliberal policies. It never explicitly denies that it happened, it just thinks that it happened in the same sense that the sinking of the Maine happened - less interesting in and of itself than the fact that sinister forces were able to leverage it for their sinister ends.
Inline links: sinking of the Maine
Your Book Review: The Accidental Superpower
May 21, 2021 · Original source
This has largely been a summary about wealth creation so far, but The Accidental Superpower is a story about a worldwide disorder that will follow from America’s disengagement from the world. To understand that prediction, you need to know what created and upholds the current world order. For Zeihan, that takes us back to Bretton Woods.
3: Bretton Woods
American empire was rejected out of an unwillingness to have a forever-war of occupation that would have been impractical to wage against the Soviets. Instead, America offers a deal that is “one of the great strategic gambits in history.” The deal offered benefits not only to England, France, and the Allies, but also to Japan and Germany that they couldn’t have even hoped to achieve had they won the war.6 Zeihan refers to this deal as “free trade” and “Bretton Woods,” based on the New Hampshire town in which the Americans dictated its terms to the Allies in 1944. It would let everyone sell into the best and last market in the world, with their commerce protected by the world’s only real navy, and all that America asked in return was the provision of cannon fodder against Soviet invasions. That may not have been such a big ask, as they may have lost their independence to such invasions without American assistance anyway. The deal was offered in pursuit of the strategic goal of containing the Soviets, presumably to avoid having them directly threaten Americans.
Inline links: 6