Bretton Woods Conference

The Bretton Woods Conference was a gathering of representatives from forty four Allied nations held at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944, convened to design the international monetary system that would govern the postwar world economy. The conference established the International Monetary Fund and the institution that became the World Bank, and set up a system of fixed but adjustable exchange rates anchored to the United States dollar, which was itself convertible into gold. John Maynard Keynes led the British delegation and proposed an international clearing union intended to spread the burden of balance of payments adjustment more evenly between surplus and deficit countries, but the conference ultimately adopted a plan closer to the one put forward by the American delegation under Harry Dexter White, giving the United States dollar a central role the Keynes plan would have avoided.