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| John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods/ |
The video skips over the collapse of the Bretton Woods exchange rate system.
And it doesn't explain that the greater Bretton Woods system was a crony system built on US dollars that resulted in massive dollar printing beyond foundational gold supplies.
Murray Rothbard explained:
In the Bretton Woods system, the United States pyramided dollars (in paper money and in bank deposits) on top of gold, in which dollars could be redeemed by foreign governments; while all other governments held dollars as their basic reserve and pyramided their currency on top of dollars.Under this system, the US never stopped printing dollars. Rothbard again:
Europe did have the legal option of redeeming dollars in gold at $35 an ounce. And as the dollar became increasingly overvalued in terms of hard money currencies and gold, European governments began more and more to exercise that option. The gold-standard check was coming into use; hence gold flowed steadily out of the United States for two decades after the early 1950s, until the US gold stock dwindled over this period from over $20 billion to $9 billion. As dollars kept inflating upon a dwindling gold base, how could the United States keep redeeming foreign dollars in gold — the cornerstone of the Bretton Woods system?And then the collapse came:
On August 15, 1971, at the same time that President Nixon imposed a price-wage freeze in a vain attempt to check bounding inflation, Mr. Nixon also brought the postwar Bretton Woods system to a crashing end. As European central banks at last threatened to redeem much of their swollen stock of dollars for gold, President Nixon went totally off gold. For the first time in American history, the dollar was totally fiat, totally without backing in gold.And, of course, as John Perkins explained in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, the Bretton Woods conference also formed the World Bank and the IMF. They are the muscle that provide loans (or back up loans) to nations that will never be able to pay them back on planned terms. Then the IMF and World Bank step in again to muscle the countries to pay back the loans via a resource grab or on the backs of local taxpayers. (For a recent example, think the Greek financial crisis.)
Perkins told National Public Radio:
[M]y real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan — let’s say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuador — and this country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to a U.S. company, or U.S. companies, to build the infrastructure — a Halliburton or a Bechtel. These were big ones. Those companies would then go in and build an electrical system or ports or highways, and these would basically serve just a few of the very wealthiest families in those countries. The poor people in those countries would be stuck ultimately with this amazing debt that they couldn’t possibly repay. A country today like Ecuador owes over fifty percent of its national budget just to pay down its debt. And it really can’t do it. So, we literally have them over a barrel. So, when we want more oil, we go to Ecuador and say, “Look, you’re not able to repay your debts, therefore give our oil companies your Amazon rain forest, which are filled with oil.”...
We called ourselves e.h.m.'s. [economic hit men]. It was tongue-in-cheek. It was like, nobody will believe us if we say this, you know?...
The World Bank provides most of the money that’s used by economic hit men, it and the I.M.F.Of course, nothing about this in the propaganda video below. Everything dome at the Bretton Woods conference was according to this video just wonderful.
-RW
At first, back in the day, I thought Perkins was a bullshitter par excellence. But upon further investigation...
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