Seleccionar página

In addition, the IMF was based in Washington, D.C., and was mainly composed of American economists. He regularly exchanged staff with the U.S. Department of the Treasury. When the IMF began operations in 1946, President Harry S. Truman appointed White as the first U.S. executive director. Since no Deputy Managing Director position had yet been created, White occasionally held the position of Managing Director and generally played a very influential role during the IMF`s first year. Easily learn financial modeling and valuation in Excel with step-by-step training. The relative decline of American power and the discontent of Europe and Japan with the system were exacerbated by the continued decline of the dollar – the foundation that had underpinned the global trading system after 1945. The Vietnam War and the refusal of the government of US President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was supposed to pay for this and his Big Corporation programs through taxation, led to an increased outflow of dollars to pay for military spending and runaway inflation, leading to a deterioration in the U.S. trade balance position.

In the late 1960s, the dollar was overvalued with its current trading position, while the German mark and yen were undervalued; and, of course, the Germans and Japanese had no desire to improve their exports and thus make them more expensive, while the United States tried to maintain its international credibility by avoiding devaluation. [41] Meanwhile, pressure on state reserves was intensified by new international money markets, whose vast reserves of speculative capital moved in search of quick profits. [40] When many of the same experts who observed the 1930s became the architects of a new post-war unified system at Bretton Woods, their guiding principles became “No longer begging your neighbor” and “Controlling speculative financial capital flows.” It was desirable to avoid a repetition of this process of competitive devaluation, but in a way that would not force debtor countries to reduce their industrial bases by maintaining interest rates high enough to attract foreign bank deposits. John Maynard Keynes, who was wary of repeating the Great Depression, was behind the British proposal that surplus countries would be forced to use a “use or lose it” mechanism to import from debtor countries, build factories in debtor countries or donate to debtor countries. [10] [11] The United States rejected Keynes` plan, and a senior U.S. Treasury official, Harry Dexter White, rejected Keynes` proposals for an International Monetary Fund with sufficient resources to counter destabilizing speculative financial flows. [12] However, unlike the modern IMF, White`s proposed fund would have automatically countered dangerous speculative flows without political conditions – that is, without IMF conditionality. [13] Economic historian Brad Delong writes that Keynes was then right by events at almost every moment he was overthrown by the Americans.

[14] [dubious – discuss] The gold standard`s support of money began to become a serious problem in the late 1960s. . .