So in the article linked above, Monbiot talks about what type of agreement Keynes wanted to see out of Bretton Woods, and what kind of global financial institution should have been developed instead of the IMF.

Reading this should be a bitter irony for Americans, as the country which most opposed Keynes proposal at the time would have benefited the most today. I fear that most of the Americans in positions of power are too thick for the irony to reach them, alas.

I am never sure how I feel about Keynes - the guy was brilliant, but from what I have seen, his prescriptions required discipline and a backbone that politicians have never managed to find. Deficit financing in recession is a wonderful idea that politicians in the 1970s hungrily latched upon like a starving infant onto a milk laden nipple. Problem is, none of these politicians or their sucessors have ever had the testicular fortitude to implement the flip side of Keyne's prescription, which is to accumulate surpluses in times of prosperity, to pay off the debt, or else be held in reserve for any future recession.

What Monbiot reports Keynes to have proposed at Bretton Woods instead of the IMF we have today seems to have been a clearinghouse which would have acted as an international demurrage currency. It would be a nice mechanism to manage trade imbalances, and would certainly have been much kinder to the developing world than the IMF has been. In hindsight, it is amazing to look at how many of the problems with global institutions in the past half century appear to have been caused by America's greed and self-interest. Composition of and veto on UN security council to prevent the UN from acting outside of American interests? Check. Massive environmental degradation in debtor nations to satisfy IMF? Check. The longer I live, the more that the sense of American exceptionalism appears quite unfounded.

I don't know which is a worse prospect to face in the future - consigning Keynes ideas to the dustbin once again, or another half-assed implementation of his ideas. Will Keyne's 60 year old prescription fall on deaf ears once again, even though it is badly needed? Or will short sighted politicians and other power brokers once again partially adopt the portions that provide immediate gain, while the other important actions that require discipline and long term planning for the future continue to be ignored?