Would a New 'Bretton Woods' Save the Global Economy?

In the wake of the great financial crisis of 2008, world leaders, from French President Nicolas Sarkozy to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, began calling for "a new Bretton Woods" to restore discipline and calm to world financial markets. The very words "Bretton Woods," it seemed, had become shorthand for enlightened globalization. Simply invoking the name of the remote New Hampshire town, where representatives of 44 allied nations came together 65 years earlier, in the midst of the century's second great war, was to put oneself on the side of order, stability, vision, cooperation, and peace. But was the actual 1944 Bretton Woods conference, the most important international gathering since the Paris peace talks a quarter century earlier, really such a kumbaya moment? Could we recreate it? And if we could, would we want to?