— Countries were to maintain an exchange rate in which the values of their currencies could fluctuate only within a narrow range around a fixed value based on gold. Gold’s value was set in terms of the U.S. dollar.
— Two organizations were set up to help govern the international monetary system: the International Monetary Fund, which would address temporary imbalances of payments, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which is now the chief agency of the World Bank Group.
The Bretton Woods system was far from perfect, but it essentially held together until the 1960’s. By the Nixon administration, which started in January 1969, the costs of the Vietnam war had fueled inflation, and trade and budget deficits had piled up. The country’s gold reserves had fallen, while the government was all but printing money. Faith in the dollar deteriorated. On Aug. 15, 1971, President Nixon unhitched the value of the dollar from the gold standard. His decision was called the “Nixon shock” because he made it without consulting any of the other Bretton Woods signatories. The change opened the era of floating currencies.
The United States worries that China will use the bank to set the global economic agenda on its own terms, forgoing the environmental protections, human rights, anticorruption measures and other governance standards long promoted by its Western counterparts. American officials point to China’s existing record of loans to unstable governments, construction deals for unnecessary infrastructure, and villagers abruptly uprooted with little compensation.
.. China is taking direct aim at the current development regime, the Bretton Woods system established under the leadership of the United States after World War II to help stabilize currencies and promote growth.
Beijing officials say they want to take a faster approach than their counterparts at theWorld Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank. The new bank, China promises, will not be bogged down in oversight.
.. A newly assertive Beijing felt that it had been unfairly treated for years by the United States. President Obama did not invite China to join the American-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, insisting that Beijing should not be allowed to write the rules for 21st-century commerce.
.. Yet Congress blocked an I.M.F. proposal, backed by the Obama administration, to make China the third-most-powerful country at the fund after the United States and Japan.
.. By early 2015, Britain was trying to claw its way out of the doghouse by adopting a mercantilist approach to China.
As a practical matter, George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, wanted London to be a prime center for trading in the renminbi. He also thought that Chinese investment was paramount for the nation’s health.
.. A deeper relationship with China is already paying dividends. During a four-day state visit by Mr. Xi to Britain in October, the two countries signed commercial agreements worth 40 billion pounds, or about $60 billion, including one for a major stake in the British nuclear industry. Mr. Osborne said Mr. Xi’s visit had ushered in a “golden era” between the two countries.
.. Still, concerns remain. The new bank, for example, is deciding whether it will give the go-ahead for highly polluting coal-fired power plants, which the World Bank and Asian Development Bank have effectively stopped financing.
Mr. Jin suggested that the bank might make exceptions for poor places where people have no access to power. “Do you leave these people in the dark? It’s a human rights issue,” he said.
Mabe I missed it,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a tweet on Friday morning, “but we just had an entire #GOPDebate on economics and #TPP was never mentioned.”
.. Rather than focussing on topics like these, the ten candidates spent much of their time attacking CNBC’s moderators (my colleague Amy Davidson has more on this) and competing with each other over who could offer Americans the lowest tax rates.
.. It was left to John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, who is seeking to position himself as the voice of sanity in the asylum, to state the obvious: “You know, these plans would put us trillions and trillions of dollars in debt…. Why don’t we just give a chicken in every pot, while we’re, you know, coming up—coming up with these fantasy tax schemes.”
.. The first problem the candidates face is that the field is still too crowded. Like Wall Street analysts (and media commentators), they therefore have an incentive to adopt extreme positions, because outliers get noticed.
Ominous street protests, outfitted with mock guillotines, are now almost daily occurrences. In Dresden, during a gathering of several thousand citizens who purport to defend Western civilization against the influx of barbaric Muslims, a man held up a homemade gallows with a dangling sign reading, “Reserved for Angela Merkel.”
.. And they’re angry about more than just refugees. Around the same time, in Berlin, protesters rallying against the proposed trans-Atlantic free trade agreement carried a guillotine.
.. What we see on the rise, in other words, is not the anger of a classic loony fringe, but rather mainstream people striking out at elites who they believe have lost touch with reality and common sense. To many here, the refugee crisis, the euro crisis, the Ukraine crisis and the threats seen in an unleashed global capitalism have converged in a fundamental question: Do the mighty still know what they are doing?
.. As a prominent member of the liberal Green Party, Mr. Palmer is the last person to stir up xenophobia. Yet even he has warned that the refugee crisis means that “the social peace in this country is at stake.”
.. To them, the fringe parties — Alternative für Deutschland on the right, Die Linke on the left — offer quick and easy certainties: no to refugees, no to free trade.