ABSTRACT
The past few years have seen dramatic events in the international monetary system. These events prompted discussions of the need for reform of that system and, associated with that, of changes to the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These discussions, essentially without exception, have the appearance of being the first of their sort. But they are not. Such discussions recur. Making new proposals in ignorance of the old is both to neglect past experience and to risk failure. In this chapter we therefore embed our proposals for the system and for the future of the IMF in it, in a discussion of its past, showing how the present IMF central framework evolved out of the international monetary turmoil of the 1930s, and how it has continued to evolve since its inception.
