He has this big argument with the American delegation. It was actually over whether the Bank for International Settlements should be shut down. And part of what the Americans wanted, they thought it was semi-corrupt, and they kind of wanted it to be shut down immediately. Keynes did not want it to be shut down immediately, and they were fighting over that. Keynes got very angry about it. He's running upstairs for a meeting and then has a heart attack.

Today, on the story of money, the origin story of what is perhaps the most important monetary agreement in modern history.

And yet, ironically, it was birthed in a remote and dilapidated New England hotel with a leaky roof, broken furniture and really bad paint job.

Ah, well, then I think I know which agreement you're talking about, Gillian.

It's the one that arguably provided the foundations for three decades of booming

trade, economic growth, all that good stuff at the end of World War II. And yes, this agreement

actually came out of three weeks of rushed negotiations among hundreds of delegates, who I gather,

frankly, spent more time

drinking than sleeping. Absolutely. But the point is, it formally enshrined the US dollar as a new

global reserve currency, knocking the pound out. And at the same time, though, the talks were

so chaotic that Britain's lead negotiator didn't even grasp this fact

until he'd already signed it, although he was supposed to be one of the most brilliant economists

in the world. It also produced two of the world's most important financial institutions,

and we still have them today, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. And yet,

neither of these institutions actually ended up serving the purposes for which they're originally set up. And here's the crowning irony.

At the time, John Mena Keynes, a British economist, who was at the college, which I oversee

today, King's College, Cambridge,

and his US counterpart, Harry Dexter White, thought this was the crowning achievement of their careers.

And yet, they would soon be dead. And in fact, it would contribute to the undoing of both of their

reputations subsequently.

So, if you hadn't guessed it already, we're obviously going to be talking about the Bretton Woods Agreement, which was signed on the 22nd of July in 1944.

So standby is coming up here on the story of money from the Financial Times with me, Gillian Tet.

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