Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

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It is said that success has many fathers and so it is with the astonishing success of the US dollar over the past hundred years, but if any one man can be credited with having laid the foundation stone upon which the dollar's empire was built, that man would be Harry Dexter White. As a senior US Treasury Department official in the 1940s, White was the key architect of the Bretton Woods system that governed the international economic order for almost three decades after WW2.

Born in 1892, White was the son of Lithuanian Jews who had fled the tsarist pogroms in 1885 and settled in Boston. Harry was the youngest of seven children and was educated in local public schools, where he was not an exceptional student. His mother had died when he was aged just nine. His father Jacob was a peddler who made a living dealing in hardware and crockery. Through hard work and thrift, the family had eventually come to own four hardware stores by the time Jacob died, just two months after Harry graduated from high school. After school, he initially worked as a clerk in the family business, but upon President Woodrow Wilson's declaration of war on Imperial Germany in April 1917, the 25-year-old Harry White enlisted in the US Army and was commissioned as an infantry first lieutenant.