Econintersect: Australian economist Steve Keen addressed a meeting of the finance ministers of Latin America 29 November 2013. He reviewed the history of the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 that established the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Keen considers the result of that decision to have been bad for Latin America, bad for the world and bad for the United States. He says that the path not taken, proposed by John Maynard Keynes, would have avoided much of the global imbalances that have plagued the world through most of the recent decades.
Here is Keen’s summary from YouTube:
My speech to the Meeting of Finance Ministers of Latin America in Quito on November 29th 2013. I explain Keynes’s proposal for an international unit of account called the Bancor, and support Zhou Xiaochuan, the Governor of the Central Bank of China, in calling for its introduction. I also argue that Latin America should in the meantime develop its own unit of account for intra-CELAC trade.
Source:
- The International Financial Architecture (Steve Keen, YouTube, 29 November 2013)
