ABSTRACT
The technical aspects of the Keynes Plan are certainly clear in their intent. Based on the ‘clearing bank’ principle it recognised that for the world system one country’s surplus had a counterpart deficit elsewhere. As the decade opened the dominating concern was with the nature of reserve expansion, the bulk of this expansion being provided by US dollars, with the USA acting as 'a world central bank, fulfilling a function left unspecified in the Bretton Woods agreement'. For present purposes it is the IMF position on this subject that is important as the failure of the Bretton Woods system at the beginning of the 1970s was far more a failure of that mechanism than of the problems of the growth of reserves. The alternative fiduciary reserve assets scheme was too late to save Bretton Woods, although, as discussed in the concluding section, it continues to evolve and may yet have a major role to play in international monetary reform.
