World Financial Organizations

BRETTON WOODS refers to the meeting and the name of the economic system constructed in 1944 in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Toward the end of World War II, several conferences were held to determine the future of the world order. The Yalta Conference, the Potsdam Conference, and Bretton Woods were the most notable. The world was carved up into two spheres of Liberal democracy and communism – the US-led sphere and the Soviet-led sphere, although there were also some non-aligned countries. Those in the US camp, consisting of 44 countries, gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to create a monetary system that put the gold-backed US dollar at the center of it. The Bretton Woods Agreement put the dollar in the position of being the world’s leading reserve currency. Intrinsic in the agreement was the available strength of the US navy, which had grown in size leading up to and during the war years. American sea power provided protection of world trade routes and in fact made possible the oil supertanker and large cargo ships. Following a brief post-war recession, the US entered a prolonged period of peace and prosperity. A new debt cycle began with the new monetary system. Wealth gaps were reduced so that the Western world had greater unity, peace and prosperity. There was also one dominant power that nobody wanted to fight. Many nations wanted to invest in the US economy because American stock prices were cheap and markets were strong for many years to come.

THE FEDERAL RESERVE is the central government bank of the United States. After the Great Depression and World War II, US monetary policy shifted as the money supply, interest rates, and lending were controlled by the Federal Reserve rather than by allowing the free market to allocate money and credit. The Federal Reserve printed a lot of money for banks to buy debt and capped the interest rates that lenders could charge. It also controlled what this money could be invested in, so high inflation did not drive interest rates to unacceptable heights and there were no investment options more attractive than the debt the government wanted people to save in.³²

IMF or the INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND is an organization that was founded after three weeks of heated negotiations at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, especially between John Maynard Keynes, who was representing the United Kingdom, and Harry Dexter White, the US Treasury representative. A deal was reached between the US and the UK to create a new gold backed reserve currency. The agreement also created the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, soon to be known as just the World Bank. Each institution was given a distinct role. The IMF’s job was to oversee a system of fixed exchange rates, which tied the value of a country’s currency to the USD which was in turn pegged to gold. The main purpose of this was to make sure exchange rates stayed stable in order to encourage global trade. The IMF was also tasked with providing short-term loans to countries struggling to pay their debts. Since President Nixon unpegged the USD from gold in 1971, essentially dissolving the fixed exchange rate system that the IMF oversaw, the organization has taken on a bigger role fighting the financial crises around the world that this financial shift created. The IMF’s purpose has become to keep tabs on the global economy and put economic policies in place in member countries. The IMF has been criticized for increasingly becoming an arm of the US government in enforcing Western hegemony. At the G20 Summit meeting in 2023, there was discussion about allowing the IMF and the World Bank to become more multilateral and to represent the interests of emerging economies in the Global South.

WORLD BANK is a separate organization in Washington DC that has its headquarters directly across the street from the IMF. Both are also across the street from the White House. Even John Maynard Keynes was confused by the difference between the two organizations. However, the main goal of the World Bank originally was to give financial assistance to countries, mainly in Europe, that needed to rebuild after the war as part of the Marshall Plan. The roles of both the IMF and the World Bank have changed a lot since the days of Bretton Woods. The World Bank focuses its efforts on development and reducing poverty. It provides funding and resources in projects in some of the poorest countries in the world. Both institutions include 189 member countries, but the IMF has around 2,700 employees, compared to the World Bank’s staff of 10,000. Today, the IMF’s biggest borrowers include Greece, Ukraine, Portugal and Pakistan. The places where the World Bank is running the most projects are in Africa and East Asia. Another thing the IMF and World Bank have in common is that they both have fierce opponents. Critics point to the conditions attached to their loans, saying they don’t always address the specific economic issues within a country. Some poorer nations argue that the same standards do not apply to members outside the West. The World Bank has come under fire for continuing to bail out Greece even as the country has failed to clean up its corrupt financial system, even while the IMF sanctions countries who are not in line with the political, military and social policies of the West’s “rules based world order.” For example, the IMF suspended all loans to Uganda, arguing that its law against homosexuality, passed in March 2023, “fundamentally contradicts” the World Bank’s values.

³¹ Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order, Chapter 5: The Big Cycles of the United States and the Dollar, Part 2. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/big-cycle-united-states-dollar-part-2-ray-dalio/.

³² Ibid.

Glossary Headings

Political Theories
Modern Political Movements
Forms of Government
Modern Political Counterfeits
Political World Orders
Culture and Society
Epistemology
Globalism
Regional and Global Organizations
World Reserve Currency
World Financial Organizations
Globalist Think Tanks, Theories, and Doctrines

Book

The Fourth Political Theory in Biblical Perspective

Jay Rogers

A Christian civilization is emerging from under the wreckage of Modern culture.

A Christian civilization is emerging from under the chaos that has been strewn throughout the wreckage of Modern culture. As dawn breaks through the darkness, many will be awakened to a new understanding of the fulfillment of the Law through love and grace. Many will comprehend, as if for the first time, what it means to be truly human. We are being prepared to overcome a world system that has denied God, faith, family, and even humanity itself. This book analyzes and critiques several leading experts in the theory of the rising multipolar world including –

• The Changing World Order by Ray Dalio
• The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington
• The Fourth Political Theory by Aleksandr Dugin