never studied economics at school and for some reason I had always thought that the ‘Bretton Woods Agreement’ was, like the Hoare–Laval pact, the product of two people, one called Bretton and one called Woods. No, the system that gave the world the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and stable exchange rates based on a decided value for gold was the result of a conference in 1944 here in Bretton Woods, attended by all the allied and non-aligned nations who knew that the post-war world would have to be reconstructed and developed within permanent and powerful institutions. The economic structure of the world since, for good and ill, has largely flowed from that momentous meeting–if structures can be said to flow.