Bretton Woods Conference

The Bretton Woods Conference, formally the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, was held from 1–22 July 1944 at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Delegates from 44 Allied nations met while World War II was still ongoing to agree on rules for the postwar global economy and to prevent a repeat of the competitive devaluations, trade barriers, and financial instability of the 1930s that many believed had contributed to the war.

Two figures dominated the negotiations: John Maynard Keynes, leading the British delegation, and Harry Dexter White, the senior US Treasury official. Keynes proposed an International Clearing Union with a supranational reserve currency he called the "bancor." White's plan, reflecting US economic dominance, prevailed in most respects.

The conference produced the Articles of Agreement for two institutions:

• The International Monetary Fund (IMF), to provide short-term balance-of-payments financing and oversee a system of fixed but adjustable exchange rates.
• The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), now part of the World Bank Group, to finance postwar reconstruction and later development.

Member currencies were pegged to the US dollar, which was in turn convertible to gold at $35 per ounce. A planned third pillar, an International Trade Organization, was never ratified; the GATT served that function from 1947 until the WTO was established in 1995.

The Bretton Woods fixed exchange-rate system functioned until August 1971, when President Richard Nixon suspended dollar–gold convertibility (the "Nixon shock"), effectively ending the par-value regime. The IMF and World Bank, however, remain central to global economic governance.

For MUN and IR researchers, Bretton Woods is a touchstone for debates about US hegemony, conditionality in lending, voting-share reform, and the legitimacy of postwar institutions in a multipolar world.