Two books published by the Center for Financial Stability, The Bretton Woods Transcripts and Just Before Bretton Woods, are now available free in PDF versions on the CFS Web site.
The Bretton Woods Transcripts contains the previously unpublished verbatim transcripts of the 1944 conference that established the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the monetary system that provided a framework for a quarter-century of rapid world economic growth. The transcripts offer insights into the course of the conference not present in the less detailed, sanitized conference proceedings released in 1948.
The book was issued as an e-book in 2012 and in hardcover in 2013. At the time, my co-editor Andrew Rosenberg and I agreed that we would limit our copyright in the electronic version to ten years. Too many books become unavailable because they are out of print but still under copyright in today’s absurdly long copyright durations.
Just Before Bretton Woods gives the previously unpublished details of the Atlantic City, New Jersey conference that wrote the draft agreements from which the Bretton Woods conference started. Unlike Bretton Woods, Atlantic City was the subject of little writing before my co-editor Gabrielle Canning and I pulled together the conference documents from the National Archives of the United Kingdom and the U.S. National Archives. The book was published in 2019, in time for the 75th anniversary of the conference. As with The Bretton Woods Transcripts, we agreed to limit our copyright in the electronic version to ten years. Given the significance of 2024 as the 80th anniversary of the Atlantic City and Bretton Woods conferences, though, we decided to relinquish the electronic copyright now.
We have used the occasion of the new electronic editions to correct some errors in the original editions and to add a bit of material we have found since.
I thank Andrew Rosenberg and Gabrielle Canning for their work on the books, which complemented my experience with the energy of youth; Jeff van den Noort for designing Web pages that made the books and thousands of pages of accompanying archival material easily accessible; and Larry Goodman for his willingness to publish the books under the CFS imprint.