Bretton Woods (to which Keynes contributed significantly, although the final arrangements differed from his proposals in important ways) had three main formal aims: to promote and fund postwar European reconstruction, in Germany and France especially; to secure the political stability of debtor nations (the UK in particular, whose finances the war had left in tatters, deeply indebted to American finance and the US state); and to stabilize the international monetary regime, which was (correctly) understood to be crucial to the first two goals. Forty-four nations, including the most powerful states in the world and led by the US (which emerged from the war the clear capitalist hegemon), signed the agreements. According to their architects, the institutions would work as follows:

The IMF, using funds contributed by all nations, would provide low-interest loan coverage to debtor states to prevent default during reconstruction and reconversion (the shift from a war-economy to a "peace-time" economy). The World Bank would provide loans or grants for the reconstruction of European (and, eventually, Japanese) economies, a flow of funds greatly enhanced by the US's Marshall Plan, which rebuilt German industry remarkably rapidly in the 1940s and 1950s (the US wanted German demand for its intermediate and consumer goods, so reconstruction was essential). To make all this possible, the international monetary regime was stabilized via a system of "fixed" exchange rates between all major currencies, so all capitalist nation-states had the value of their moneys "pegged" to specific rate against the US dollar (unsurprisingly, China and the Soviet Union were not signatories). The foundation of the system lay the US dollar's anchor to a gold standard. In other words, its value was pegged to gold, which made the US responsible for the stability of the regime as a whole. Every US dollar was to be backed by--exchangeable for--gold: 1 troy ounce for every 35 US dollars, to be precise.