Over at JOTWELL,
Daniel Shaviro (New York University) has posted a
review of
Benn Steil,
The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton University Press, 2013). Here are the first two paragraphs:
It’s always nice when you can combine outside reading for fun with
something that is educational and at least indirectly professionally
relevant. Benn Steil’s economic and diplomatic history of the 1944
Bretton Woods conference, which established the post-World War II global
framework for currency relationships and international trade (while
also creating the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) filled
this niche for me during a quiet weekend. While the subject is not
literally or directly related to taxation, it touches so closely on
finance, macroeconomic policy, and international trade as to occupy a
common universe with overlapping concerns.
The book tells a lively story, in which U.S. Treasury economist Harry
Dexter White – an ardent economic nationalist yet also a Soviet mole –
thoroughly squelched the great English economist John Maynard Keynes
(the U.K.’s chief negotiator) in establishing the postwar regime for
trade, currency, and capital flows. With the U.S. economically dominant
and the U.K. reduced to begging for loans, Keynes would have had no
chance even had he been better at converting his analytical and
epigrammatic skills into diplomatic ones.
Read on
here.
