The Basis for a New Bretton Woods System Today, Part I
In June of 2007, economist Lyndon LaRouche warned that the global financial system was ready to collapse at any moment, and that nothing from within the current system could save it. He was right. LaRouche said that the problem was the system itself — the speculative financial system put in place, step by step, after the August 15, 1971 destruction of FDR’s fixed-exchange-rate Bretton Woods system.
Knowing the collapse was imminent, LaRouche proposed that four leading nations — the United States, Russia, China, and India — representing the greatest physical and political potential in the world, join together to negotiate a new financial architecture, to realize FDR’s dream of leaving behind all forms of colonialism. This, LaRouche insisted, would be the only way to reassert the sovereign interests of nations and their people, over the imperial interests of global finance that have ruined the global economy since the end of the Bretton Woods. Listen to LaRouche’s 2007 proposal:
The urgency of the New Bretton Woods cannot be overstated. In the following LaRouchePAC mini-documentary, we show how the elimination of fixed exchange rates in 1971 ushered in the era of speculative financial warfare against nations and the decline of the productive powers of labor throughout the planet. Until a fixed-exchange-rate system between nations is re-established, the City of London and Wall Street will continue to manipulate currencies and limit the physical development of economies through austerity regimes which benefit the very rich at the expense of the majority of the world’s populations. Here’s how it works.
Without the reorganization of the world’s economic system, we are guaranteed to experience a financial collapse far worse than that of 2008. And only if the United States, Russia, China, and India work together, is it possible to put in place a superior global system. You can read here LaRouche’s comments to a 2009 gathering of diplomats in Washington, DC, on why cooperation among these four nations is essential.
More from Lyndon LaRouche on the Four Powers Agreement
Any questions? Leave them in the comments section below.
In the next segment, we’ll take up the difference between the American economic system ideas which Franklin Roosevelt proposed for the post World War II world and the opposing ideas of the British Empire which won the day in August 1971. >>>