Global Imbalances and the Lessons of Bretton Woods Book

The global economy is hardly a new phenomenon; it can easily be traced to the 16th century, following Columbus, building on the European economy of the Renaissance. Despite, or perhaps because of, all that history it is hugely complicated to understand, as we are all finding out with the emergence of a new global recession. Eichengreen is one of a small band of international economists who have spent their careers trying to untangle some of the main threads and for modern-day economists that means starting with the United Nations international economic confererence at Bretton Woods in 1944, which created the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and the exchange rate and currency support scheme it created. It's all pretty arcane, and unsettling to realize how little control we have of the global economy, but without technicians like Eichengreen (there are maybe 200 of them in the world), the global economy would probably have run off the rails entirely decades ago.