I will talk about The Bretton Woods Transcripts on Wednesday, January 20 to an informal group called the Prosperity Caucus. The talk will be at the Heritage Foundation, 214 Massachusetts Ave., N.E., Washington, D.C. Union Station is less than a 10 minute walk away. Doors open at 6 p.m. I will start talking at about 6:30 p.m. for 30-35 minutes, then take questions. Contrary to the announcement on the Prosperity Caucus Web site, Allan Meltzer will not be commenting. He was scheduled at the original talk, cancelled because of Hurricane Sandy, but can’t come Wednesday.

Here is the text of an e-mail interview I had with Cyro Franklin de Andrade, editor of the Brazilian magazine Valor econômico, which formed the basis of two articles in Portuguese mentioned in my previous post. Questions are in italics, answers are in Roman (regular) type.

1. How could it be explained that the transcripts you have found remained forgotten for so long? What were your immediate next steps after finding them? Where are the originals now?

Much of the answer, I think, is that the Bretton Woods conference received more attention from economists than from historians. Economists are trained to analyze statistical or verbal material prepared by others. They are not as often trained to go find new or neglected material.

After I found the transcripts in the U.S. Treasury Library I showed them to the librarians, who were unaware that the transcripts existed. The Treasury Library’s set of the transcripts is now stored in a cabinet. As for the other sets, see my reply to question 3.

2.   Which remarks by John Maynard Keynes were unfamiliar to you and caught your attention? What other details and / or passages of the transcripts would you highlight as being especially telling about what was only partly known so far?

I saw Keynes’s remarks in a meeting of the “commission” (committee) on the World Bank. Keynes was the chairman of the commission, so of course he did much of the talking. (Unfortunately, because of a shortage of stenographers, there is only one meeting of that commission in the transcripts.) Because Keynes has been a person of such great interest to so many researchers, I thought that if the transcript had already been known, it would already have been published somewhere. I found that it had not been published.

On the question of what is especially telling, the transcripts make clear a number of points. One is that the allocation of “quotas” (capital subscriptions), which were linked to voting power, was extremely contentious and many countries were dissatisfied—as has often happened in later years, when quotas have been reallocated. A second point is that there is a place in the transcripts where the delegates are talking about whether the IMF should conduct its business in gold or whether it should accept currencies convertible into gold. A U.S. delegate remarks that the U.S. dollar was at the time the only major currency convertible into gold. That was the origin of the Bretton Woods monetary system as being based on both the dollar and gold, rather than being purely based on gold. Yet another point that is very clear in the transcripts is that the Soviet Union did not want to reveal information about its economy to the rest of the world. The Soviet Union signed the Bretton Woods agreements but later decided not to become a member of the IMF and World Bank, and part of the reason was that they did not want to comply with the obligation of IMF members to reveal detailed economic information.

3. You found that there was another copy of the transcripts in the IMF archives and what appears to be the original in the National Archives. Are these copies of the same originals? Or are there differences that distinguishes one copy from another, including the one you’ve found in the Treasury’s Library?

The copies in the IMF Archives and the Treasury Library appear identical. They are both Photostats, an early kind of photocopy, bound in 4 volumes. The only difference is that the Treasury Library copies have the name of Harry Dexter White written in them, while the IMF copies have the name of Edward Bernstein written in them. (White was the chief U.S. negotiator at Bretton Woods and Bernstein was his deputy. Both men worked at the U.S. Treasury Department during Bretton Woods and later went to work at the IMF.) The National Archives has what appears to be the original set. The National Archives papers are loose, rather than being bound in volumes; the paper not shiny like a Photostat copy; and it has clear type and original pencil or pen marks.  As far as I know, these three sets of the transcripts are the only ones in existence. In its early years, the IMF used its copy of the transcript to make a retyped version of the portions of the transcripts dealing with the IMF. It distributed a limited number of copies for internal use. The IMF Archives has a few of them. The IMF Archives posted a copy online earlier this year, when Andrew Rosenberg and I were finishing work on our book. It is here:

http://adlib.imf.org/digital_assets/wwwopac.ashx?command=getcontent&server=webdocs&value=\BWC\BWC1556-01.pdf

4. You’ve found that the transcripts had been known to and cited by earlier scholars, but that present-day scholars were unaware of the earlier references. Which of the different copies had been known of and cited by earlier scholars? Which scholars?

J. Keith Horsefield, who wrote the official history of the IMF’s early years (published in 1969), cited the copy in the IMF Archives. Henry Bittermann, an American who was part of the conference secretariat, cited one of the transcripts in a 1971 article in a law journal, but did not specify where the transcript was located. Dag Halvorsen, a Norwegian journalist, cited the National Archives holdings in a 1982 history dissertation published in Norwegian. (I found what may be the only copy of the dissertation outside of Norway, in the Library of Congress in Washington.)

 5.  In your opinion, which books came closer to the essential points of the transcripts you found? What information failures have been diffused throughout the years that can now be noticed with the publication of the transcripts?

Previously, the only detailed book exclusively devoted to the conference was Armand van Dormael’s 1978 book Bretton Woods: The Birth of a Monetary System. Van Dormael is a Belgian businessman who, during a long retirement (he is now in his 90s) has developed a productive second career as a historian of modern times and technology. There are also some letters, memos, and reminiscences by participants at the conference, such as those in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes and in Stanley Black’s book of interviews with Edward Bernstein, A Levite Among the Priests.

I don’t think there were any great information failures about the Bretton Woods conference. We already knew the main result of the conference, of course: the agreements on the IMF and World Bank. We also had some details from previously published material. What the conference transcripts do is add much more detail, and, in particular, they help us understand how the conference accomplished so much: the conference did not start from zero (the Atlantic City conference, just before Bretton Woods, arrived at preliminary draft agreements for the IMF and World Bank—see the answer to question 7); the delegates were smart; they focused on essential matters; they generally avoided giving long speeches; and they worked very hard, from 9 a.m. sometimes to 3 a.m. the next morning.

6. You’ve said that the official history of the IMF’s early years, written by Keith Horsefield and published in 1969, referred to them [the transcripts] only to dismiss them as “unofficial verbatim reports, but the incomplete and provisional nature of these reports makes them of uncertain value”.  How should we interpret the expression “uncertain value”?

Because the transcripts were not intended for publication, they contain sections where the stenographers could not hear clearly what was being said, or did not understand well the topic being discussed. Unlike the case with a transcript of a legislative hearing or a courtroom trial, the stenographers at Bretton Woods did not consult the speakers or other witnesses and try to clarify all the unclear sections. In my opinion, though, it is possible from the context to give a likely account of what the delegates said in most of the unclear sections.

7. Some say that what happened in Bretton Woods was just a sort of “theater”: what was to be discussed and decided was discussed and decided before and after the conference. How do you evaluate this opinion?

Immediately before Bretton Woods, there was a two-week conference in Atlantic City, New Jersey for a smaller group of delegates (mainly those from the larger economies, although I do not know if Brazil participated). At that conference some basic ideas about the IMF and World Bank received concrete form. It was still the job of the Bretton Woods conference to accept or reject those proposals, however, and to add many more details in areas where the Atlantic City conference had offered few or no specific proposals.

(Part 2 will come in a later post.)

The Brazilian business magazine Valor econômico has published two articles about The Bretton Woods Transcripts:
“Bretton Woods sem censura” (Bretton Woods uncensored)
“Bretton Woods, Keynes e a utopia da cooperação” (Bretton Woods, Keynes, and the utopia of cooperation)

In a future post I will publish the e-mail interview in English that was one of the bases of the articles. Readers who are interested in the articles but do not know Portuguese can get a rough idea of the contents by using Google Translate.

Though I am not an expert on international conferences, in my research I have found no major conference other than Bretton Woods where verbatim records were kept but there was no thought that they would ever be published. There have been many conferences where the proceedings were not public and no verbatim records were kept. There have also been many conferences where the proceedings were public. At such conferences, delegates have often played to the gallery. There is some playing to the gallery in the transcripts of the Bretton Woods conference. Some delegates made speeches that were intended to be issued as press releases. For the most part, though, such grandstanding did not bog down the conference.

I would be grateful if any reader can name another major international conference where we have verbatim records never intended to be published.

Central Banking, a quarterly journal for practitioners and observers of central banking, has published an article on The Bretton Woods Transcripts. (Article is here, but it may not be accessible from all computers.) Jacques de Larosière and Steve Hanke, who wrote the preface to the book, repeat some observations they made there. In particular, they stress how effective the conference was at covering the issues before it and how a number of those issues persist today. De Larosière was Managing Director–the top official–of the International Monetary Fund from 1978-1987; he remains active in French financial circles and is currently chairman of Eurofi. Hanke is Professor of Applied Economics at The Johns Hopkins University and Special Counselor at the CFS.

Sunday, December 16 from about 9:45 to 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time I will be on the John Batchelor radio show with guest host Chris Riback to talk about The Bretton Woods Transcripts. The show originates from WABC in New York, 770 on the AM dial. The station’s signal reaches across much of the eastern United States. You can also listen to the broadcast live online (click the “listen live” button near the top right of the page), or later on the  podcast page for John Batchelor.

The Internet has created new possibilities for distributing previously out-of-print writings. At the same time, the United States and many other countries have greatly extended the length of copyright. The result is that writings that are valuable for the advancement of knowledge but that have very small readership are copyrighted for decades longer than was envisioned when they were written. Some works that were out of copyright have even gone back into copyright. Publishers have made some works accessible behind pay walls, but others remain unavailable in any legal digitized form.

To prevent such a fate from ever befalling The Bretton Woods Transcripts, Andrew Rosenberg and I have voluntarily limited our claim of copyright to the electronic version of the book to ten years. Starting in 2023, anybody will be able to reproduce the electronic version provided that he distributes it to readers for free. Few scholarly books will ever be big sellers, especially a decade after their first publication. We recommend voluntary, binding limitation of copyright claims as a way for other scholars to balance the benefits of whatever royalties their work might generate against the benefits of having the work readily available, clear of any legal entanglements from copyright.

(Andrew and I will retain other rights not important for scholarship, including the movie rights. Steven Spielberg, call us. We have in mind Daniel Day-Lewis to portray John Maynard Keynes, with Steve Buscemi as Harry Dexter White.)

In this article I discuss how I happened on the transcripts of the Bretton Woods conference. The editor chose to omit a paragraph in which I explained that originally I thought somebody else might be able to use the typescripts more effectively than I would. I contacted a friend who is a university professor supervising a number of Ph.D. students, some of whom were seeking dissertation topics at the time. I told him of the existence of the transcripts and of my belief that they would make good material for a dissertation, but received no expressions of interest. Fortunately, I later met Andrew Rosenberg, who had the qualifications necessary for a coeditor: more free time than I had, interest in converting the typescripts into a book, good research skills, and willingness to endure the boring parts of putting a book together for the sake of the satisfaction the end product would bring.

Michael Pettis is known as one of the most astute observers of the Chinese economy. He is Professor of Finance at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. In the November 12 issue of his China Financial Markets newsletter (link is to his related Web site, not to the newsletter itself), he writes these reflections on The Bretton Woods Transcripts:

For those who are interested in this sort of thing (and I confess I most certainly am), transcripts of the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 have recently been discovered and are being published on Kindle.

…One part of the debates that I found especially interesting was a debate on workers’ remittances. The USSR had insisted during the meetings that workers remittances be included in the capital account, and so subject to capital controls. Several other countries, led by China, were opposed. The latter won the debate, and today, of course, workers’ remittances are included in the current account.

Among other things this shows just how wobbly some of the capital account/current account distinctions are. I think from a political point of view workers’ remittances should certainly not be subject to capital controls, but otherwise I think conceptually they really belong in the capital account, although because they tend to be countercyclical there certainly are good reasons for suggesting that they should be treated differently from other items in the capital account. I would also argue that interest payments and dividends, which are today part of the current account, should be part of the capital account although again, because they are nominally fixed and not subject to changes in investor sentiment, perhaps they don’t fit wholly comfortably in the capital account.

For those who read French, Le Monde ran a story on The Bretton Woods Transcripts in an article titled “Des transcriptions inédites de Bretton Woods retrouvées.”

A slightly different English version by the same reporter can be found here.