Suchergebnisse

With Britain's empire collapsing and Stalin ascendent, U.S. officials set out to reconstruct Western Europe as a bulwark against communist authoritariansim. This is the story of the Marshall Plan and the birth of the Cold War: a gripping account of the seminal episodes marking the post-WWII collapse of U.S.-Soviet relations.

When turmoil strikes world monetary and financial markets, leaders invariably call for 'a new Bretton Woods' to prevent catastrophic economic disorder and defuse political conflict. The name of the remote New Hampshire town where representatives of forty-four nations gathered in July 1944, in the midst of the century's second great war, has become shorthand for enlightened globalization. The actual story surrounding the historic Bretton Woods accords, however, is full of startling drama, intrigue, and rivalry, which are vividly brought to life in Benn Steil's epic account.

In July 1944, in the midst of World War II, representatives of 44 nations gathered in a remote New Hampshire town to create something that had never before existed: a global monetary system to be managed by an international body. In the 1930s, internationalists in the U.S. Treasury Department were determined to resolve the flaws in the international economic system once and for all. In the words of Harry Dexter White, a then little-known Treasury official who became the unlikely architect of the Bretton Woods system, it was time to build a "New Deal for a new world." Working in parallel and in prickly collaboration with his British counterpart, the revolutionary economist John Maynard Keynes, White set out to create the economic foundations for a durable postwar global peace. Despite having never held any official title of importance, White had by 1944 achieved implausibly broad influence over U.S. foreign and economic policy. Grudgingly respected by colleagues at home and counterparts abroad for his gritty intelligence, attention to detail, relentless drive, and knack for framing policy, White made little effort to be liked. Even White's closest colleagues were unaware, however, that his postwar vision involved a far more radical reordering of U.S. foreign policy, centered on the establishment of a close permanent alliance with the new rising European power -- the Soviet Union. And they most surely did not know that White was willing to use extraordinary means to bring it about. Over the course of 11 years, beginning in the mid-1930s, White acted as a Soviet mole, giving the Soviets secret information and advice on how to negotiate with the Roosevelt administration and advocating for them during internal policy debates. White was arguably more important to Soviet intelligence than Alger Hiss, the U.S. State Department official who was the most famous spy of the early Cold War. Adapted from the source document.

Discusses the possibility of a profound crisis in confidence in the US dollar that would end its dominance in global financial markets. Attention is given to the impact of globalization on capital flows, the prospect of the euro replacing the dollar as the leading international currency, & why the dollar should be sustained. Adapted from the source document.

The so-called European model of market integration has evolved over many decades. In particular, the original plan to integrate Europe economically via a progressive program of harmonizing national legislation has, particularly in the area of financial markets, given way to a radical alternative based upon Member State mutual recognition of existing national legislation and regulation. Whereas this shift had been initiated largely on pragmatic grounds, the mutual recognition approach has since taken on an ideological and strategic dimension in political negotiations which makes the study of its effects on the ground all the more important.