The opéra bouffe that was the Bretton Woods conference

There ought to be a comic opera about the Bretton Woods conference — Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, about Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, with its mordant libretto by Philip Hensher, should be the model. Everything about the conference was overdone. It was held in 1944 in the gargantuan Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire, which provided a preposterous background of gimcrack luxury. The arrangements were as farcically managed as the Atlanta Olympics. The boy scouts who were dragooned in to help run the conference would make a wonderfully playful chorus in the Adès-Hensher opéra bouffe.

There were 400 delegates from 77 countries — to say nothing of hundreds of slavering newshounds. They were assembled by President Roosevelt to agree the terms of two new global institutions, which became known as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These bodies were to be charged with managing a global postwar financial system which would replace the unregulated disarray of prewar years. The IMF and World Bank schemes had been hammered out during 1943 by a small team of English negotiators, led by John Maynard Keynes, and by a vast battery of American experts headed by Harry Dexter White.

Notoriously Keynes and White had titanic confrontations. They baffled, exasperated and infuriated one another. Both men were under stress, for Keynes knew that he was dying of cardiac disease, and White was a spy supplying information to Soviet Russia. It is hugely to the credit of these incompatible men that, during a world war, they persuaded two imperial powers, whose long-term interests were irreconcilable, to reform global capitalism along lines that were not only interventionist and co-operative, but optimistic about the possibilities of human fulfilment.