Cinquant’anni dopo: il sistema monetario di Bretton Woods in prospettiva storica

This contribution tackles the international monetary system established at the Bretton Woods Conference against the backdrop of the relationship among globalization, economic growth and international monetary relations from WWI to the 2008 Great Contraction. The first section reviews the relationship between the integration of national markets in the international economic system and their domestic growth from the nineteenth century classical gold standard to the 1980s. It emphasizes the pivotal importance of exchange rates among the currencies united in an international monetary system to account for their economies’ rates of domestic growth. The second part pinpoints the role of both the U.S. Federal Reserve System, and the international financial markets, in stabilizing the international economic system. Thereafter the article stresses the role of the U.S. dollar both under the fixed-exchange rate system, and since the mid-1970s under the new fiduciary dollar standard regime: the financial innovation that erupted in the 1980s favored this renewed centrality of the dollar.