# Bretton Woods Conference The **Bretton Woods Conference** (formally the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference) was the July 1–22, 1944 gathering of 730 delegates from 44 Allied nations at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, that designed the postwar international monetary order. With the [[Great Depression]]'s currency wars and the rubble of World War II as the cautionary backdrop, the delegates built a system meant to deliver exchange-rate stability and rebuild global trade without repeating the chaos of the 1930s. The system had two pillars. First, a **gold-dollar exchange standard**: the U.S. dollar was fixed to gold at $35 an ounce, and every other currency was pegged to the dollar — making the dollar the world's reserve currency and the United States the anchor of global finance. Second, two new institutions to police and finance the order: the **International Monetary Fund** (to lend to countries with balance-of-payments problems and keep pegs stable) and the **International Bank for Reconstruction and Development**, the core of what became the **World Bank**. The intellectual contest behind the design pitted Britain's [[John Maynard Keynes]], who wanted a supranational currency and a more symmetric system, against the U.S. Treasury's Harry Dexter White, whose dollar-centric plan won — a reflection of America's overwhelming postwar economic and gold-reserve dominance. For the KB, Bretton Woods is the **bookend to the [[Nixon Shock]]**. It opens the era of fixed exchange rates and tightly-regulated, gold-anchored money that the New Deal banking order operated inside — the quietest, most stable stretch in the [[Financial System Timeline]]. Its 1971 collapse, when [[Richard Nixon]] closed the gold window, ended that anchor and launched the [[Fiat Currency]] era that the entire modern hard-money, [[Gold Standard]]-revival, and crypto debate reacts against. The dollar's reserve-currency status — and the "exorbitant privilege" it confers on the United States — is the one piece of the Bretton Woods architecture that survived the system's death. ## See Also - [[Nixon Shock]] — the 1971 end of the system this conference created - [[Gold Standard]] - [[Monetary Policy]] - [[Financial System Timeline]] - [[Financial System Hub]]