"Why can't we do [Bretton Woods] again?" Bretton Woods was signed after half a decade of war had reduced much of Europe's productive economy to rubble. The war itself was the rightmost bookend of three decades of internal European strife and tension that began with World War I, which caused the financial collapse of the West in the 1930s due to war debts and a decade-long economic depression that still had not fully ended when the war began. The incumbent hegemon, the United Kingdom, was our ally and helped facilitate the peaceful transition to a dollar based monetary standard. At the time of its signing, the US was the world's largest creditor nation and only solvent superpower in the room. The terms were basically dictated by the U.S. and peacefully agreed to. The so-called global prosperity that emanated for years afterward was in part financed by the United States and featured mass rebuilding of industry in Germany, Japan, Britain, and elsewhere. The starting credit position of the United States gave it ample runway to provide a hungry world economy with dollars for decades before imbalances started appearing. The starting points of 1944 versus today do not remotely resemble each other. We enjoy none of the relative advantages that we had back then. Today, the US is the world's largest debtor nation and its net debt position (in NIIP terms) is larger than all other debtor nations' positions combined. We have not endured multiple decades of economic and financial upheaval of the variety that would peacefully produce a new global monetary standard. The world's second strongest economy is our adversary, a budding superpower in its own right, and would not be a friendly participant in the negotiation of a new world order. We are an aging hegemon, in some ways comparable to the United Kingdom of that long ago era, but we do not have a new America waiting under our wings. Our posture has shifted from the feigned benevolence of past decades when trade cooperation and conflict mediation were claimed to be our goals, to openly embracing our role as the agitant empire and increasingly wielding our currency and economy as blunt weapons against foes and friends alike. The old monetary system IS fraying, and WILL be forced to change, but it will not resemble the unipolar Bretton Woods. We are seemingly heading for a bipolar world with dollar friendly and dollar belligerent blocs, further breakdowns of trade cooperation, escalating military rearmament, and increasing capital controls. I doubt this transformation will be peacefully agreed upon in an idyllic mountain lodge like 1944. Far more likely is that deep imbalances in the status quo force the hand(s) of one or more states and catalyze a domino rally of repatriation that dissolves us into a new disorder. https://x.com/SternDrewCrypto/status/2082851849540153803/video/1(𝐓𝐗𝐌𝐂)