Jeffrey Garten
speaker
224 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 3 Jun
Jeffrey Garten’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And everybody at that moment had confidence that the US could pull this off, in large part because it had so much gold that anyone who wanted to exchange their currency for gold was given a commitment that the US would do that.
And so this was seen as a very, very stable system.
And the objective was that monetary stability would lead to more trade.
The whole focus really was on the expansion of trade.
correct?
Absolutely.
And I think it's hard for us to conceive today
But the US was so preeminent at that moment.
It was not only the world's most powerful military machine, but it was the only country in the world that came out of the Second World War stronger than when it went in.
And so the amount of confidence
that other countries had and that they could lean on the US and that the US was their only hope was really palpable.
And there really was no alternative because the US basically was calling the shots
It deserves a lot of credit.
The thing is that the system, it worked, but it was under a lot of strain right from the beginning because the task of helping Japan and Europe recover was much, much bigger than anyone envisioned.
And so it was at first really the U.S.
that supplied all the funds, not the International Monetary Fund, which itself was a creation of Bretton Woods.
And if you looked at the Eisenhower administration and then the Kennedy administration and then the Johnson administration,
There were great strains on Bretton Woods and the strains got bigger and bigger, but it held until the Nixon administration.
Well, the key strain was this, that the whole system depended on countries outside the US accepting the dollar
using the dollar and knowing that if they ever wanted to, they could take the dollars they were using and exchange it for gold at a fixed rate.
Showing 21–40 of 224 · page 2 of 12
← Previous
Next →