ABSTRACT
Great institutions, like great families or nations, have great ancestors. Humanity looks to its founding fathers and mothers for guidance, inspiration and strength. The World Bank, like its sister the International Monetary Fund, has two recognized ancestors, a lesser and a greater. The lesser is the American, remembered now mostly by specialists. His name was Harry Dexter White and he later became a victim of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s vicious anti-communist witch-hunts. The greater is the Englishman, known at least by name even to those who have never read a line of his work: John Maynard Keynes. The outcome of Bretton Woods was, perhaps, a foregone conclusion: everyone understood that what the Americans wanted, the Americans would get. The threat of keeping troops away from home a moment longer than necessary would have been enough to prod even the most recalcitrant politician into action. Lord Keynes had invented the pooling of credit insurance among nations.
