75 books like Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods

I was in my first year of college when I witnessed (via news reports) the “Battle of Seattle,” where anti-globalization protestors shut down a negotiating round of the World Trade Organization.

Watching the news from Seattle made me want to study the politics of the international economy. Seattle seems to have had a similarly big impact on Slobodian since it pops up in the introductory and concluding chapters of Globalists.

Slobodian’s book tells the story of how a group of dissident economists and lawyers, mainly centered in Geneva, rewrote the postwar international rules to legally “encase” market-based transactions. This effort, which included the creation of the WTO in 1995, made markets more seamlessly globalized. But it also put the increasingly powerful market forces beyond democratic mechanisms of regulation and control, spurring backlash. 

Pistor’s book explains how global finance grew so large, powerful, and unstable. The short answer: elite lawyers did it.

Pistor argues that they did it by creatively devising legal instruments that could turn both tangible (land, for example) and intangible things (like intellectual property) into capital. When lawyers were able to make legal instruments enforceable around the world, capital could become truly global. Why did they do this? Simple: “minting” capital through creative lawyering is extraordinarily lucrative.

Before reading this book, I knew that elite contract lawyers were very well compensated, but I didn’t understand what they were doing and didn’t think of them as key players shaping the international economic order. Pistor’s book informed and corrected my thinking. 

Reading this book in graduate school was revelatory. It was mostly ignored upon publication. But in the subsequent eighty years Hirschman’s insights have become part of the bedrock of my field of international political economy.

The key idea is that countries seeking to enhance and expand their power can use “liberal” commercial strategies to induce economic and political dependency in smaller, weaker partners. It’s dangerous, in other words, to simply assume that more extensive trade and investment flows between countries will engender a more stable, peaceful international system.

Uncontrolled trade can aggravate tensions and facilitate international disorder. Hirschman arrives at a bold idea: surrendering national authority to follow global rules and institutions is the only way to counteract the harmful effects of massive power and wealth inequalities in world politics.

The name of the professor who assigned my first book recommendation in a graduate seminar: Jonathan Kirshner. Clearly, he’s had a big impact on my thinking.

In this book, Kirshner masterfully explains the ramifications of ungoverned (and crisis-prone) global finance. The 2008 financial crisis delegitimated American claims to responsible stewardship of the international economy, amplified the attractiveness of the model offered by a rising China, and eroded American material power.

In the book Kirshner did not anticipate the election of Trump or the outbreak of COVID-19 (who could have?) but the events of the last decade have, if anything, made Kirshner’s elucidation of the risks associated with a weakened U.S. at the helm of an unstable international economic order even more relevant. 

This is the story of the momentous wartime meetings in New Hampshire that mapped out the new institutions that were to guide the global economy through the Cold War and after: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It is an absorbing intellectual battle between arrogant British aristocratic John Maynard Keynes and the scrappy US Treasury official Harry Dexter White. (Spoiler alert: White won, but spoiled his reputation by likely being a Soviet spy.)

Money is not the root of all evil, as this book makes clear in a highly entertaining romp through the major events in the history of coin and their derivatives. The author, who made his name with Empire, covers everything that really matters including the rise of the loan sharks, historic bubbles, the development of currencies, the egregious behaviour of a few very greedy and/or crooked people, supposedly fool-proof money-making schemes that backfired, and much else. If you want to understand how money works, you can hardly do better.

As a finance guy, I had always heard of the BIS or Bank for International Settlements, but I had no idea what it did, how it worked, or its history.

Adam LeBor expertly explains in the Tower of Basel not only what and who the BIS is, but how they have manipulated and influenced the global economy for generations. Despite the bank's strong connections to the Third Reich during the 1930s, the BIS continues to dominate global finance today as the central bank for central banks.

Every two months, leaders from the most powerful central banks in the world including the Federal Reserve meet in Basil to chart a course for the world economy under a cloak of secrecy. Tower of Basel rips the veil from this clandestine organization and exposes dark forces few are aware of.

This book is a welcome antidote to the defeatism that results from a crisis-prone view of the world which is so easy to fall into today.

Grable argues that we should recognize that the rigid models that define a narrow “correct” path to progress are inadequate. Instead, she puts forward the value of what she calls “unscripted” innovations and reminds the reader of the value of “muddling through” and incremental change.

Grable shines a well-deserved light on earlier work by Hirschman and Lindblom. She combines an appreciation of the importance of ideas and the necessity of a high tolerance for complexity and incoherence. This book makes the case for the importance of remaining calm and carrying on, while still keeping an eye out for opportunity.  

This book adds the international dimension to the Neoliberal story. Gindin and Panitch argue that the U.S. national state and “American MNCs” found key allies abroad among many dominant groups, as various state elites and dominant class fractions worldwide stood to gain through neoliberal reforms. The authors argue that supranational organizations developed largely along U.S. strategic lines. They explain for example how U.S. representatives hold inordinate influence through supranational forums such as the Bank for International Settlements, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund. Furthermore, legal reforms (with U.S. support) have been made in many countries to limit the influence that voters have on economic policy with, for example, the de-politicization of trade policy. This is the story we tell for the U.S. writ large.

King was the head of the Bank of England during the financial crisis of 2008. He declared full deposit insurance for the entire United Kingdom private banking system, with no deposit premiums required. This ended the run on the banks that spilled over into the streets of the UK during the crisis, when the Bank of England at first decided not to take care of Northern Rock, a private retail bank that was headed towards insolvency.

King provides a whimsical and sharp review of the private and central bank system before and after the crisis that builds very much on Charles Goodhart and Walter Bagehot. King laudably faults economists and the Economics profession for thinking that establishing negative real interest rates worldwide is the answer to central bank crises (in his newly added Introduction to the paperback edition of his 2016 hardback by the same name). Yet King sides with… show more.