The strain of maintaining fixed exchange rates had proved too much for countries in the past, especially when their trade accounts fell into deficit. The role of the IMF was designed to deal with this problem, by acting as an international lender of last resort. But while White, as the representative of a creditor nation (and one with a trade surplus), wanted all the burden of adjustment to fall on the debtors, Keynes wanted constraints on the creditors as well. He wanted an international balance-of-payments clearing mechanism based, not on the dollar, but a new currency called bancor. White worried that America would end up being paid for its exports in “funny money”; Keynes lost the argument. Ironically enough, now that America is a net debtor, White’s administrative successors have called for creditors to bear part of the adjustment when trade balances get out of line.
The Bretton Woods exchange-rate system saw all currencies linked to the dollar, and the dollar linked to gold. To prevent speculation against currency pegs, capital flows were severely restricted. This system was accompanied by more than two decades of rapid economic growth, and a relative paucity of financial crises. But in the end it proved too inflexible to deal with the rising economic power of Germany and Japan, and America's reluctance to adjust its domestic economic policy to maintain the gold peg. President Nixon abandoned the link to gold in 1971 and the fixed exchange-rate system disintegrated.
Both the IMF and World Bank survived. But each has fierce critics, not least for their perceived domination by the rich world. The IMF has been criticised for the conditions it attaches to loans, which have been seen as too focused on austerity and the rights of creditors and too little concerned with the welfare of the poor. The World Bank, which has mainly focused on loans to developing countries, has been criticised for failing to pay sufficient attention to the social and environmental consequences of the projects it funds. It is hard to believe that either institution will be around in another 70 years' time unless they change to reflect the growing power of emerging markets, particularly China.