PRESS RELEASE

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Britain's Hedge Funds Hysterical over "New Bretton Woods" Discussion

Oct. 17, 2008 (EIRNS)—The head of a leading London hedge fund issued a diatribe in London's Daily Telegraph today titled: "Financial Crisis: The last thing we need is a Bretton Woods," denouncing FDR's Bretton Woods as a misguided failure, and demanding hyperinflation as a "solution" to the debt crisis. George Cooper of BlueCrest Capital, Europe's third largest hedge fund manager, with approximately $11.5bn under management, writes that last Friday, "the global monetary system came perilously close to systemic failure," only to be saved by the bailout. The poiticians are "traumatised," Cooper says, leading to foolish talk of a "New Bretton Woods."

But the Bretton Woods, he says, while it seemed to work at first, "proved to be unsustainable" due to the accumulation of US deficits, and "ended in ignominous failure in 1971 when President Nixon was forced to abandon the gold peg and devalue the dollar." The following "Bretton Woods II, "in which the developing nations pegged their currency to the dollar, was just as bad, recycling trade surplusses back into US dollar debts.

"We do need a new strategy for managing our monetary system system," Cooper writes, but not the Bretton Woods. We have "little option but to inflate our way out of this debt."