Word: bretton
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...poor reception? For a tax that's attracted high-profile backers like Brown and Sarkozy, its track record is thin. When Tobin first proposed the idea in 1972, it was seen as a way to stop currency speculators after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, but it was never imposed. Sweden enacted a tax on certain financial transactions in the 1980s but ditched it in 1991 after trading volumes sank. (See pictures of President Sarkozy in London...
Even in its revamped form, the IMF will be less of a significant player on the world stage than its founders intended at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. Back then, the resources allocated to the IMF amounted to more than half of the world's current account payments. Today, its resources amount to about 3%, according to Buira. Still, if the G-20 intentions are put into practice and the IMF does take on a more active - and more accepted - role as a stabilizing force in the world economy, it will be much closer to the original vision...
SDRs were created to supplement the Bretton Woods currency regime, which was built around a dollar linked to gold. After President Richard Nixon decoupled the dollar from gold in 1971 and allowed it to float freely in currency markets, the subsequent dollar crash led to talk of establishing the SDR as global reserve currency. That faded when the high interest rates set by Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to throttle inflation lured foreigners back to the dollar in the early 1980s...
Keynes led the British delegation to the 1944 conference in Bretton Woods, N.H., where Allied officials determined the postwar shape of the global financial system. He was unable to persuade his U.S. counterparts to give the institution at the heart of the new system, the IMF, the money-creation powers he envisioned. Those finally came in 1969 with the development of the SDR but remained limited in scope. No new SDRs have been created since 1981, and there are only 21.4 billion of them (equal in value to $31.9 billion...
...Bretton Woods is the mountain resort in New Hampshire where in 1944 the Allied nations met--with the U.S. calling almost all the shots--to plan a postwar financial system. The Bretton Woods creations included the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and a quarter-century of fixed exchange rates built around a U.S. dollar that was linked to gold. The fixed exchange rates and gold standard unraveled in the 1970s, and ever since we've had a system in which the IMF occasionally steps in to help countries in currency crises (usually imposing harsh terms in the process...