Suchergebnisse

It is customary to date the origin of the Bretton Woods system
back to 1942 when Keynes, and his associates in London, prepared the
three famous memoranda on the International Clearing Union, on Commodity
Buffer Stocks and Plans for Relief and Reconstruction. To these three
memoranda we may add the Beveridge Report which appeared in the same
year, 1942. Keynes had taken a great interest in the Beveridge Report
and this model of a national social welfare state was readily capable of
international extension and application. However, in this historical
perspective, we may well go a little further back. The Great Depression
of the 1930s had shown that in the absence of multilateral agreements
and multilateral institutions, the economic system was in danger of
degenerating into beggar-my-neighbour policies leading to general
immiserisation. The World Economic Conference of 1931 had been a first
attempt to create an international economic order to prevent this
condition from continuing. Although this attempt ended in failure, yet
the ideas then brought forward had continued to reverberate in Keynes's
mind. His vision underlying the 1942 documents was governed by the
overarching principle of "Never Again!" -never again back to the
conditions of the 1930s which were seen as having brought about not only
mass misery and mass unemployment but also Hitlerism and war. Also never
again a failure like that of the 1931 World Economic
Conference!