Why A Bretton Woods II?
In that sense, a key tenet of Bretton Woods — the effort at a fixed exchange rate — was a failure. So why have French President Nicolas Sarkozy, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and others called for a “new” Bretton Woods? “There’s a broad sense on the part of the Europeans that the international monetary, financial and trade institutions are stuck — that they haven’t worked properly for some time and in a sense they see this crisis then as an opportunity to address a long-standing set of concerns about how the international economy ought to function,” says Andrews. But today, there is no international consensus on which direction to move and considering the timing of a mid-November summit — scheduled days after the U.S. presidential election — there is unlikely to be enough political will to move ahead quickly. Without the serious groundwork laid by a Keynes and White, “I can’t imagine there would be any real result in terms of reform of the system,” says Cohen. A C
