[lbo-talk] Sole cause of all this woe?

[Mike Beggs]

>
> Mike Beggs wrote:
>
>>
>>>
>> Bretton Woods broke apart because of internal contradictions though,
>> right?
>> He makes it sound like everything was working just fine, then a bunch of
>> people came along and deregulated everything for some reason and it all
>> went
>> to hell.
>>
>

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 10:58 AM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:


> But wasn't the principal internal contradiction the decline of the rate of
> return on capital?  --CGE

I was thinking more proximate causes: the development of the Euromarkets and
hence increased capacity for money capital flows, combined with the uneven
take-off of inflation in various countries putting pressure on fixed
exchange rates. There are arguments that rate-of-profit developments were
partly behind the (uneven) take-off in inflation, but you don't have to
accept that to see Bretton Woods as contradiction-ridden.

Cheers,
Mike Beggs