Locator: 49980MACROECONOMICS.
It's amazing how much a solid book (in this case John Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics, c. 2025, and Google Gemini / ChatGPT can summarize an undergraduate year of macroeconomics in less than a concentrated 72 hours of study. Truly, truly amazing.
From ChatGPT after a long dialogue overnight with my friend who never sleeps:
- WWI breaks the old order →
- Keynes diagnoses the failure →
- WWII decides the hegemon →
- Bretton Woods institutionalizes managed capitalism under U.S. leadership →
- Nixon breaks the gold constraint to preserve U.S. flexibility →
- Trump exposes the political exhaustion of being system manager.
Slight expansion:
- WWI --> Paris Peace Conference --> Keynes
- WWII --> beginning of unparalleled global economic growth for the next 75 years --> US / UK hegemon
- Keynes (UK economist) / White (US Treasury) --> Bretton Woods, NH --> need for global "management"
- established the IMF (International Monetary Fund)
- established an International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (later called the World Bank)
- established the International Trade Organization: work to reduce tariffs and other barriers to trade
- 1947: US signed along with 23 other nations, a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which led to opening up of markets
- would lead to long-running rounds of negotiation
- LBJ/US inflation --> Nixon
- Nixon Shock 1971: collapse of gold standard --> fiat
- (Friedman / Hayek)
- US exhaustion as system manager --> Trump
"Collapse to fiat" after Nixon: "collapse to fiat" means that the US dollar was cut off from the discipline of the gold standard, transitioning to a system based on government decree that allows for unchecked, politically driven money creation.
That's my scaffolding from which I can now work.
Right, wrong, indifferent -- that's where I can start.
I won't entertain comments from anyone who has not read John Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics, c. 2025. I will know if you have a copy of his book by telling me the last word on page 274 of the hardcopy edition of that book.
