February 22, 2024
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Fed gives Main Street the brush-off

IN THIS ARTICLE

Perhaps in some Hollywood version of reality, the Bacara resort in Goleta really could pass for The Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.

Bretton Woods, as it is commonly known, was the getaway spot where the framework for the modern financial system was created in the summer of 1944 as the U.S. and its European Allies anticipated victory in World War II.

At that moment, great minds convened to establish the institutions that would steer our economy for more than half a century. A meeting in the forests of New England seemed just the place for deep thoughts that would create an artifice for finance that would, with adjustments, endure through the oil shock of 1973, the great inflation of the late 1970s, the market crash of 1987 and the subsequent savings and loans fiasco, Asian credit crisis, Long-Term Capital Management collapse and countless other major and minor meltdowns.

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