When you mumbled the Pledge of Allegiance in grade school, you likely didn’t think you’d grow up to be taxed to death and a pawn in central-banker economic chess games. If you’re old enough, the dimes and quarters you did chores for were silver. You heard there was gold in Fort Knox backing US greenbacks, making them so very precious. Your parents didn’t know who was running America’s central bank or what the central bank did, for that matter.
Now, Fed chairs are maestros and persons of the year. The current chair, Dr. Yellen, would be in line to be similarly worshipped, but she, Mario Draghi, and the other central bankers of the world may begin taking marching orders from even higher powers.
Today’s Fed watchers should train their eyes on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to get an idea who will bail out the bailouters. The likes of IMF deputy managing director Dr. Min Zhu could make Yellen and Draghi yesterday’s news in the coming financial crash and ensuing monetary one world order. After all, these competing currencies are so messy, as economist Robert Mundell would say, “The optimum currency area is the world.â€
The IMF was born in the scenic mountains of New Hampshire at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, an event that dragged on for three weeks, with 730 delegates from 44 nations and 70 members of the press corps overflowing the resort grounds and filling hotels miles away.
Long forgotten is the American protagonist Harry Dexter White, but the great man representing Britain remains worshipped to this day by the world’s monetary mandarins—John Maynard Keynes. Lord Keynes’ wife, former prima ballerina Lydia Lopokova, would swim daily in the frigid waters of the Ammonoosuc River and dance late into the night in her room, interrupting the sleep of US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. rooming directly below.
Maybe this is why Morgenthau delivered the opening address and vowed not to let the “slick-tongued, aristocratic bamboozlerâ€â€”Lord Keynes—“near the podium on the opening day.â€
