by berzowska
Bretton Woods II:
[Via The Big Picture]
Vincent Farrell, Jr. is Chief Investment Officer of Scotsman Capital Management LLC., a New York based investment management company. Over his long career on Wall Street, he has worked for numerous distinguished firms. Mr. Farrell graduated from Princeton University in 1969 and received his M.B.A. from the Iona College Graduate School of Business in 1972.
The Mount Washington Hotel is in Carroll, New Hampshire. It is not the hotel featured in the Jack Nicholson movie “The Shining.” That was the Timberline Lodge near Mount Hood, Oregon. So it’s ok to stay in rooms 215 and 217 (or is it 415 and 417 ?) The hotel’s golf club-the course was designed by Donald Ross- has enshrined the locker used by Babe Ruth on his visits there. Because it’s near the Bretton Woods ski area, the conference of Allied world leaders held towards the end of World War II at the hotel was called the Bretton Woods Conference. That is a much better name than Mount Washington Resort Conference. The conference was held in July of 1944. The war was still raging. The D-day Normandy invasion of Europe was barely a month old and the tide of war had changed, but the outcome was not yet assured. The 44 countries that attended had been victims of unenlightened monetary and fiscal policies in the 1930’s and had come to realize international cooperation was necessary. Repeated currency devaluations to increase the competitiveness of exports had led to corresponding actions by other nations and only worsened deflationary spirals. In a sense, WW II was an economic savior as demand for goods was met by labor shortages and inflation fears broke the deflationary mindset.
[More]
Bretton Woods II will probably not have quite the impact of BW I, simply because with US is changing administrations so I would not expect big decisions to be made. But study BWI if you want to know somewhat how we got here.
It will take some really innovative people to get us through all this. There is this interesting footnote:
Interestingly, the Mount Washington Hotel failed and was taken over by the FDIC in 1990 during the Savings and Loan bailout. Having been built for $1.2 million in 1902, it was auctioned for $3 million in 1991 and is thriving today. Maybe that’s a story line that the world can follow.
Source:
Breton Woods II
Vincent Farrell
Soleil Securities, Nov 10, 2008
www.soleilgroup.com
