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

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The Bretton Woods system would ultimately break down amidst the Vietnam War, when US deficits made the dollar fix to gold no longer tenable. By that time though, the dollar had already been firmly embedded at the heart of the global monetary system and, after the gold standard was abandoned in 1973, the dollar itself simply supplanted the role of gold in the global monetary hierarchy. Harry White was to die in 1948 under the shadow of a Congressional investigation into his espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union. Despite his vehement denials, later revelations from both US and Soviet archives confirmed that he had been passing sensitive information to the Russians since the 1930s.ssss1 Nevertheless, he had undeniably achieved for the dollar a feat of financial alchemy that sterling had never accomplished in its century as the leading global reserve currency.

Bretton Woods ushered in a long period of growth and prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s. The dollar's special status under that system enhanced its role as a currency of lending and borrowing in international markets. Under the previous gold standard, a dollar that flowed out of the US represented a unit of gold outflow that would reduce the lending capacity of the US banking system. However, under the Bretton Woods system, a dollar that left the country had a high probability of finding its way back into a deposit at a US bank, amplifying the amount of credit that US banks could lend out. This should have placed New York at the centre of this international dollar market. However, through a remarkable confluence of circumstances and opportunism, the financial centre that won out was not New York, but that familiar financial capital of the old world: London.