PRESS RELEASE
Evans-Pritchard: `No New Bretton Woods, Ever!'
London Guardian: `Go Back to Keynes'
Nov. 22, 2008 (EIRNS)—This release was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC).
On Nov. 18, the same day as Lyndon LaRouche's international "The Last Chance" webcast, addressing what must be done for a new world credit system, with stable currencies and treaties to restore the economy, there appeared on the blog of the Daily Telegraph of London, an article titled "Bretton Woods Is a Dangerous Trap," by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. He began, "Please, please, no more Bretton Woods monetary systems for the world ever again. They are poisonous." He continued, "Rugged, dysfunctional, exchange regimes of various kinds have played a key part in almost all the financial smash-ups of the last century, and are the source of our current ills." He gave an array of historical and current instances, in which the United States was frequently the villain. For example, "The Great Depression was a breakdown of the post-World War One fixed exchange system ... [which was] in reality a half-baked global dollar system."
His solution? "The answer is to let currencies float to their natural levels." Citing moves today towards capital and currency controls, Evans-Pritchard warned, "this is a slippery slope towards a dirigiste world."
Today in The Guardian of London comes another Brutish advisory to the world at large on the matter of a new Bretton Woods, and also on the alleged villainy of the United States. George Monbiot writes under the headline, "John Maynard Keynes Not to Blame for Current Financial Mess." Monbiot praises Keynes for his proposal, backed by the British delegation to Bretton Woods in 1944, which was "an ingenious system for persuading creditor nations to spend their surplus money in the economies of debtor nations." How? Set up a global bank, the International Clearing House," which would issue its own currency, the "bancor," and induce nations to have neither trade deficits nor surpluses, by offering penalties and rewards.
The problem was, writes Monbiot, that, "The head of the U.S. delegation at Bretton Woods, Harry Dexter White, responded to Keynes' idea thus: 'We have been perfectly adamant on that point. We have taken the position of absolutely no."
Thanks to U.S. adamancy, concludes The Guardian article, we got the IMF, which is now ruining nations. "As the financial crisis deepens, the rich nations will be forced to recognize that their problems cannot be solved by tinkering with a system that is constitutionally destined to fail. But to understand why the world economy keeps running into trouble, they first need to understand what was lost in 1944."
