Introduction: The Reshaping of US Foreign Financial and Monetary Policies from the 1960s to the 1970s

Abstract

After outlining the main characteristics of the literature on the role of the USA in the world economy since WWII, mostly focused on the postwar era, this section points to the decades of the 1960s and 1970s to provide an introduction to the history of the US foreign financial and monetary policies within the framework of changing international oil markets and capital markets developments reconstructed in this study. It outlines the main historical issues that such investigation tackles and illustrates the worthiness of exploring continuities and pathbreaking changes in the US strategies to resurrect the dollar in exchange markets and to restore US balance of payments equilibrium. It rounds off by pointing out the very end of the 1970s as a watershed in the history of both US foreign economic policy and the role of international economic institutions set up at the Bretton Woods conference. In charting the history of US foreign economic policy since the teetering of Bretton Woods’ stability in exchange rates and commodity prices, this work aims to detect the historical dynamics that lay at the origins of such a pathbreaking turn at the end of the 1970s.