Forty-four Allied countries helped design the postwar monetary system in 1944.

The conference took place while the Second World War was still being fought. Its participants were designing institutions for a future peace rather than celebrating an already completed recovery. They wanted rules that would make international payments more stable and help countries rebuild without repeating the destructive monetary conflicts of the interwar years.

The number 44 refers to participating national delegations, not to every country in the world or every later member of the institutions. The meeting was an Allied conference shaped especially strongly by American and British negotiations. Broad participation mattered, but it did not mean that all delegations possessed equal financial influence.

Two institutions emerged from the agreements. The IMF would support monetary cooperation and help countries facing balance-of-payments difficulties. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or IBRD, would support reconstruction and development. The IBRD became the original institution at the center of what developed into the World Bank Group.

The background included the Great Depression, banking crises, exchange restrictions and competitive currency policies. Policymakers worried that countries acting defensively in isolation could worsen one another’s problems. A country short of foreign exchange might restrict imports, while trading partners suffered from the resulting loss of markets.

British economist John Maynard Keynes and American Treasury official Harry Dexter White developed influential but different proposals. Their disagreements concerned how the system should be financed, how much adjustment would fall on deficit countries and what an international monetary institution should do. The final design reflected negotiation rather than the adoption of one thinker’s complete blueprint.

The conference met at the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire. Its formal title was the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, using the wartime designation for the Allied coalition. That wording predates the formal establishment of the United Nations organization in 1945 and can otherwise create confusion.

The monetary framework used fixed but adjustable exchange rates. Countries generally maintained currency parities against the dollar, while the United States maintained official dollar convertibility into gold at $35 per troy ounce for foreign official holders. Adjustments were possible under agreed conditions; the intention was stability without absolute immobility.

The agreements did not become fully functioning institutions simply because delegates finished their meetings. Governments still had to accept the arrangements through their own procedures. The IMF and IBRD formally came into existence in December 1945, with operational activity developing afterward. A conference agreement and an institution’s opening are different milestones.

The original exchange-rate system eventually broke down. The United States suspended official dollar-to-gold conversion in August 1971, and major currencies moved toward floating in 1973. That change did not abolish either the IMF or the World Bank institutions. Their work evolved beyond the monetary arrangement that had accompanied their creation.

This distinction explains why “Bretton Woods” can mean two related things. Sometimes it names the specific postwar exchange-rate regime. Sometimes it refers to the institutions born from the conference. The regime ended, but the organizations continued, adapting their lending, surveillance and development roles to a different international economy.

Bretton Woods produced both institutions and a framework for international monetary relationships. Those are related achievements, but they did not share an identical lifespan. The original exchange-rate regime eventually broke down while the organizations created through the agreements continued to operate and evolve.