Zach Carter: belief

Transcript context

…The Bretton Woods monetary system — overrated or underrated? Underrated. We only really had it for about nine years, once all of the rules had been implemented and everything. It’s not like it was this gigantic success for so long, but I agree with Paul Volcker, that was a mistake to blow up. There was a framework for international cooperation and harmony that allowed for negotiation. There was a shared set of norms that I think we miss today. Particularly the deterioration of the US relationship with China right now, for instance — difficult thing to imagine if the US and China were part of a Bretton Woods report. 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.…

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