The Global Economy

Pick up a cotton t-shirt from your closet. The cotton was likely grown in Uzbekistan or Texas, spun into yarn in India, woven into fabric in Bangladesh, dyed in China, cut and stitched in Vietnam, printed with a logo designed in New York, shipped in a container built in South Korea aboard a vessel registered in Panama, and sold to you through a retailer headquartered in Sweden. The garment crossed more borders than most diplomats. It cost you twelve dollars.

That shirt is the global economy in miniature. Not an abstraction, not a policy debate, but a physical object whose existence depends on thousands of people across dozens of countries cooperating through a lattice of contracts, currencies, shipping routes, and trade agreements that took half a century to construct. The system that makes this possible is younger than you might think, more fragile than its architects intended, and more consequential than almost any political arrangement in human history.

The global economy as we know it was designed in a hotel in New Hampshire. In July 1944, while Allied soldiers were fighting their way through Normandy, 730 delegates from 44 nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in A resort town in New Hampshire where representatives of 44 Allied nations met in July 1944 to design the postwar international monetary system. The conference produced the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and a fixed exchange rate system pegged to the U.S. dollar, which was itself convertible to gold at $35 per ounce. This framework governed international finance until 1971. to build the financial architecture of the postwar world.