Activity

[...] Eventually de Gaulle softened his opposition to the European Union, after repeated American pledges in the 1950s that France would remain Europe’s administrative center. But he would only embrace it so long as, in his own words to a visiting journalist, the European Union resembled 'a horse a…

On the one hand, the Bundesbank had a duty--to the Bretton Woods system, to defend the realm of Germany--to see the speculators off and hold the line. On the other hand, the Bundesbank intensely disliked printing Deutsche Marks in defence of exchange rates it had not chosen and in quantities it des…

Keynes’s proposal was brimming with intellectual power; White was overflowing with the power vested in him by America’s economic and military might. Keynes advocated a global system that could stabilize capitalism for a fabulously long time; White's brief was to push through a system consistent wit…

One of the casualties of the European war was money. Nazi-affiliated regimes in occupied countries had printed so much of the local currencies to support the Axis’s war effort that the money in Europeans’ pockets was not even worth the paper it had been printed on. And even in countries that had es…

[...] A tale of two debts was turning into a morality play with no end. Europe is an ancient continent and our debts to each other stretch decades, centuries and millennia into the past. Counting them vindictively, and pointing moralizing fingers at each other, was precisely what we did not need in…