Top international financiers to revisit Bretton Woods

Some of the world’s most prominent thinkers on finance and economics will descend on New Hampshire in April, at the same site where the world’s dignitaries convened to restructure the global economy in the wake of World War II.The annual conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking – a nonprofit founded in 2009 with a $50 million pledge from financier and philanthropist George Soros – will be held April 8-11 at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods.Confirmed attendees to the invitation-only conference are some of the world’s most famous economists and leaders, including former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who will deliver a keynote address.Other confirmed speakers include Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve; Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia University professor and Nobel laureate; Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada; Adair Turner, chairman of the UK’s Financial Services Authority; Harold James, historian and professor at Princeton University; and more than 200 other noteworthy academics and businesspeopleSelection of the conference site was no coincidence. The Mount Washington Hotel went down in history in 1944, when 730 delegates from the 44 allied nations convened at the grand hotel in the White Mountains to reconstruct the world’s economy after World War II and the Great Depression.The original Bretton Woods Conference, which closed with a speech by John Maynard Keynes, established the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the American dollar as the basis for international exchange.”In the years since the 1944 conference, the globalization of production, trade, and especially finance, has transformed our economy, but has not yet transformed our system of regulation or our tools of policy intervention,” notes the event description. “Indeed, our very habits of thought and speech lag behind the realities that we desperately need to think and speak about.”All of the conference panels will be videotaped, and many attendees interviewed, and they will be available to see online at ineteconomics.org. — KATHLEEN CALLAHAN/NEW HAMPSHIRE BUSINESS REVIEWS