Bretton Woods System (1944)

Class card for the international monetary order established at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Mount Washington Hotel, Bretton Woods NH, 1–22 July 1944 — 730 delegates from 44 Allied nations; lead architects Harry Dexter White (US Treasury) and John Maynard Keynes (UK Treasury). The White Plan (dollar-centered adjustable peg) defeated the Keynes Plan (Bancor supranational currency). Core outputs: (1) the dollar-gold peg at $35/oz (ratifying the 1934 Gold Reserve Act rate); (2) fixed but adjustable exchange rates for member currencies; (3) the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD/World Bank), founded 1945; (4) the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, 1947) as the trade-liberalization complement; (5) the Marshall Plan (1948) providing dollar liquidity to enable system operation. The system operated under US hegemonic design: the United States held approximately $26B in gold (~70% of world gold reserves) in 1944, giving the dollar the only viable anchor for the system. Robert Triffin (Yale, 1959–1960) identified the inherent structural contradiction — the Triffin Dilemma: the US must run persistent current-account deficits to supply world dollar liquidity, but excess dollars erode confidence in the $35/oz peg. This internal contradiction was unresolvable without institutional reform (SDR proposals, Bancor revival) that the US hegemonic position blocked. Nixon Shock 15 August 1971 (Nixon's executive closure of the gold window) terminated dollar-gold convertibility. The Smithsonian Agreement (17–18 December 1971) attempted a realigned fixed-rate system at $38/oz — it lasted fourteen months. Final float: March 19 1973. IMF and World Bank survive post-1971 as institutional residue — their mandates expanded post-2008. The Bretton Woods System is classified artifact_type_in_2026=intelligent_ghost: the system formally ended 1971; IMF/WB persist as residual institutions; de-dollarization rhetoric and SDR proposals are the ghost-narrative. machine_type=incorporeal: the system is a treaty-framework plus institutional scaffold; IMF/WB have corporeal HQs but the OPP (the order itself) is incorporeal. Standalone card: successor_of=[], preceded_by=[], identity_lineage_id=null — Bretton Woods is not in the central-bank-lineage-cluster-1609; it is the international-order layer ABOVE the central banks, not a central bank itself.