Stanley W. Black - A Levite Among the Priests: Edward M. Bernstein and the Origins of the Bretton Woods System

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A Levite Among the Priests

A Levite Among the Priests

Edward M. Bernstein and the Origins of the Bretton Woods System

Stanley W. Black

First published 1991 by Westview Press

Published 2018 by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1991 by Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the
Library of Congress.

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-00412-5 (hbk)

Contents

Guide

Few economists of the twentieth century have been as closely involved with the important international monetary events of the period as Edward M. Bernstein. Born in 1904 in New Jersey, he grew up in a family where economic questions were regular family conversation. After undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and a doctoral dissertation under Taussig at Harvard, he took his first permanent position at the North Carolina State College in 1930. His book on Money and the Economic System attracted attention in many quarters, leading him first to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1935 and thence to the U. S. Treasury in 1940.

As chief economist in the Treasury's Division of Monetary Research, Bernstein was responsible for research on the balance of payments, Foreign Funds Control, and wartime inflation. After becoming Assistant Director of the Division, he also assumed responsibility for the wartime gold and foreign exchange operations of the Treasury. And in early 1942, Bernstein began to work on preparations for the postwar international monetary system. He supervised the technical studies supporting the U.S. proposal for an International Stabilization Fund devised by Harry Dexter White, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. He participated in the negotiations during 1942 and 1943 with the United Kingdom, Canada, the Soviet Union, China, and others in preparation for the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944. At the conference, Bernstein served as Executive Secretary and Chief Technical Advisor to the U. S. delegation and acted as spokesman for the delegation.

Subsequently, Bernstein helped guide the Agreement through the Congress over the objections of the banking community. He disagreed with White over the size of the postwar British loan and the draconian Morgenthau plan for a pastoral Germany after the War. In June 1946, Bernstein became the first Director of Research of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a post he continued to hold until his resignation in 1958. At the IMF, he brought together a notable staff of economists who did innovative work on exchange rates, balance of payments problems, and the adjustment process. He also helped establish the publications International Financial Statistics and IMF Staff Papers. In 1957 he disagreed with the Managing Director of the Fund, Per Jacobsson over several issues, including the extent of need for additional reserves, and resigned.

After retiring from the International Monetary Fund, Bernstein organized his own firm, EMB Limited, Research Economists, to publish reports on monetary and economic problems. The subscribers included leading central bankers and international financial institutions around the globe. The reports were the source of a steady stream of new ideas for strengthening the international monetary system, including proposals for loans to the Fund from large industrial countries and for the creation of a new reserve asset. These were adopted in modified form by the International Monetary Fund as the General Arrangements to Borrow (the Group of Ten) and Special Drawing Rights. In 1982, he liquidated EMB, Ltd. and became a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, where he continues to write papers on international monetary problems.

The series of interviews that follows was taped in Washington at the Brookings Institution in November 1983, shortly after I joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The tapes were transcribed by Amy Glass of the Southern Oral History Program and deposited with the Southern Historical Collection of the University of North Carolina Libraries. Permission to reproduce the interviews in edited form and the three papers written by Edward M. Bernstein on the fortieth anniversary of the Bretton Woods Agreement is gratefully acknowledged. Vaishala Mamgain prepared the Glossary of Names.

Stanley W. Black
Chapel Hill, N. C.

Background, Education, and Teaching Career

Stanley Black: You were born in Bayonne, N.J.?

Edward Bernstein: Yes. I was born there in 1904. We moved to New York about 1917. I was brought up in Jamaica, Long Island which was then an extreme part of New York City on Long Island, hardly much settled in those days.

S.B.: What was your father doing?

Bernstein: My father was an insurance agent and later a business broker. He sold businesses--little businesses.

S.B.: Bought and sold them both?

Bernstein: No, he was a broker, he arranged the sales.

S.B.: I see. Do you have brothers and sisters?

Bernstein: I have two sistersI'm the youngestone of whom is alive, she's about eighty-five.

S.B.: Did the others go to college, as well as yourself?

Bernstein: No, I was the only one who went to college in my family. There weren't many boys, and we didn't have the tradition of girls going to college seventy years ago. I was the only one in my family who went to collegebut, then, I was the only boy in the family. But my cousins did go and, in fact, one of my cousins won the Nobel Prize in physics.

S.B.: Oh, is that right? Who is that?

Bernstein: His name is Arno Penzias and he's vice president of AT&T's Bell Laboratories.

S.B.: How do you spell Penzias?

Bernstein: P-e-n-z-i-a-s. So when I say I'm the only one, I'm talking about children in our own family. In fact, my father had no brothers, and he had one sister. We weren't a prolific family. But the connections through my father's sister provided more boys and girls and they were very good.

S.B.: So, you went to the University of Chicago. What area were you interested in at that time?

Bernstein: I was interested in two things. I was interested in economics because I liked economics and wanted to become an economist, though I thought also of being a journalist specializing in economics. But I mainly enjoyed, for fun, the department of anthropology.

S.B.: Oh, I see.

Bernstein: We were a small group at Chicago in those days; undergraduates and graduates mixed easily and, in fact, after my second year I took almost all graduate courses. I moved very easily with the ten or twelve people who were specializing in anthropology, though I knew the faculty in economics much better.

S.B.: What sort of anthropological interests did you actually have?

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