Zach Carter: evaluation

Transcript context

…But didn’t it have to blow up? Wasn’t the whole thing premised on the notion that the US could just keep on printing dollars, which, actually, the world wanted to have out there. And other countries, but most of all, the French, would never take those dollars and convert them into gold. Once the French started going to the gold window, which is inevitable — it’s a general way that a speculative peg gets broken — it was all over. There were particular details to how it ended, but pegs are hit by speculative attacks, and they fail. It’s a story that you see happening in the 1990s and all of the financial crises that happen there. So yeah, there’s a weakness. [laughs] I don’t disagree with the critique, but everybody got along until it blew up. Maybe it did have to fail. Keynes certainly didn’t like the idea of linking everything to the dollar and linking the dollar to gold, but I don’t think he necessarily was worried about it predominantly from those speculative-peg, hot-money kind of issues. I think he was more concerned about the replacement of Britain with America as a geopolitical, hegemonic issue. I don’t know, it seemed to work okay until it didn’t. Was the euro a good idea? Because if you like Bretton Woods, you might think the euro is a more enduring version of it, but it’s not obvious to me the euro has gone well.…

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