ABSTRACT
The IMF may appear to fit only rather poorly in the context of a confer ence on the emergence of modern central banking, since it is clearly not a central bank constituted on an international scale. It is, however, a finan cial institution, lending to and borrowing from governments. Certainly, the initial wartime vision of John Maynard Keynes went much further and envisaged the creation of a new international money by the proposed Clearing Union; and Harry Dexter White’s original mission for a World Bank included note issue (to replace gold) as well as the functions of an ordinary commercial bank (Oliver, 1971). In the 1960s, as the interna tional monetary system became dangerously over-dependent on the dollar, new proposals were made for satisfying the world’s need for reserves. Some aspects of the Special Drawing Right (SDR) proposals in the 1960s revived the initiative for an international currency, but the SDR was deliberately so restricted in its use as to make it a non-money available only to governments (and solely in particular circumstances and with particular obligations). The SDR was in fact devised as a solution to the problem of a general shortage of reserve assets, a problem which has quite clearly not existed since the beginning of the 1970s.
