Monetary transformation: revisiting the end of the Bretton Woods order

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the existing international political economy (IPE) literature, the demise of the Bretton Woods order is widely regarded as a key transformative moment in the development of the global political economy. Three successive waves of IPE literature have highlighted how the collapse of the monetary regime heralded the politics of exchange rates, the explosion of global financial markets, and new institutional configurations. Contrastingly, drawing on and developing heterodox theories of money, this paper postulates that the globalization of financial markets was rooted in the post-war processes of monetary transformation. More specifically, as the US dollar operated as ‘money of account’ and dynamically developed as social relation of credit and debt at the international level, the dual features of the US dollar secured the emergence of global financial markets in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, the end of the Bretton Woods order entrenched the transformative features of the US dollar on an international scale such that the US dollar was firmly established as institutionalized money, and US government debts became ‘risk’-free assets.