There is no doubt that China will play a more important role in the international monetary and financial system in the future. The creditor-debtor relationship between the United States and Britain in the 1940s is strikingly similar to that between China and the United States today. China officials' descriptions of the current monetary and financial system problems are almost the same as those of the US Treasury in the 1940s (it is the fault of profligate debtors whose monetary and fiscal policies are too loose), and what the United States says today is exactly the same as that of Britain in the 1940s (it is the fault of selfish and mercantilist creditors). Tim Geithner, the former US Treasury Secretary, proposed to limit the current account surplus of 20 10, which is also a typical Keynesian proposal.

But we don't need to exaggerate this similarity. Although the United States has experienced a relative economic downturn, compared with China, it is far from falling into the situation of Britain in the 1940s. The US dollar still accounts for 63% of the world's foreign exchange reserves, and you can issue bonds in your own printed currency (this is different from Britain in those years, because you need to borrow US dollars). 1956 during the Suez canal crisis, the Eisenhower administration threatened to withdraw the IMF's financial assistance to Britain, because if the total amount of British securities it held was distributed to every American citizen equally, each person only had 1 US dollar, so the cost of provoking the pound crisis was very small. Today, if the total amount of US securities held by China is evenly distributed to every China citizen, it is about $65,438+$0,000 per person. Therefore, if China launched the dollar crisis to teach the United States a lesson, then at least in the short term, China itself will suffer as much as the United States.

Q: What important lessons did the Bretton Woods Conference provide for the decision-makers in the current reform of the international financial system?

A: The Bretton Woods Conference is essentially a transaction between two countries. One is the United States, the largest creditor country in the world, and the other is Britain, the largest debtor country in the United States; Their policies are crucial to global financial stability. The United States agreed to help countries with serious current account deficits, while these countries promised to give up competitive devaluation of their currencies. Now, from a political point of view, it seems out of reach to formulate a road map for cooperative currency reform. China, the world's largest creditor, and the United States, China's largest debtor, seem unwilling to sublimate their existing power in the monetary field into any abstract concept that can benefit the whole world. This means that in the reform of the global monetary and financial system, the relationship between countries will be difficult to coordinate and confrontation may occur.