title: Central Park

text: The park was the site of numerous high-profile crimes during the late 20th century. Of these, two particularly notable cases shaped public perception against the park. In 1986, Robert Chambers murdered Jennifer Levin in what was later called the "preppy murder". Three years later, an investment banker was raped and brutally beaten in what came to be known as the Central Park jogger case. Conversely, other crimes such as the 1984 gang-rape of two homeless women were barely reported. After World War II, it was feared that gay men perpetrated sex crimes and attracted violence. Other problems in the 1970s and 1980s included a drug epidemic, a large homeless presence, vandalism, and neglect.


title: Central Park

text: As crime has declined in New York City, many of these negative perceptions have waned. Safety measures keep the number of crimes in the park to fewer than 100 per year , down from approximately 1,000 in the early 1980s. Some well-publicized crimes have occurred since then: for instance, on June 11, 2000, following the Puerto Rican Day Parade, gangs of drunken men sexually assaulted women in the park.


title: Central Park

text: Permission to hold issue-centered rallies in Central Park, similar to the be-ins of the 1960s, has been met with increasingly stiff resistance from the city. During some 2004 protests, the organization United for Peace and Justice wanted to hold a rally on the Great Lawn during the Republican National Convention. The city denied an application for a permit, stating that such a mass gathering would be harmful to the grass and the damage would make it harder to collect private donations to maintain the park. A judge of the New York Supreme Court's New York County branch upheld the refusal.


title: Central Park

text: During the 2000s and 2010s, new supertall skyscrapers were constructed along the southern end of Central Park, in a corridor commonly known as Billionaires' Row. According to a Municipal Art Society report, such buildings cast long shadows over the southern end of the park. A 2016 analysis by "The New York Times" found that some of the tallest and skinniest skyscrapers, such as One57, Central Park Tower, and 220 Central Park South, would cast shadows that can be as much as long during the winter, covering up to a third of the park's length. In 2018, the New York City Council proposed legislation that would restrict the construction of skyscrapers near city parks.


title: Central Park

text: Central Park's size and cultural position has served as a model for many urban parks. Olmsted believed landscape design was a way to improve the feeling of community and had intended the park as the antithesis of the stresses of the city's daily life. The Greensward Plan, radical at the time of its construction, led to widespread changes in park designs and urban planning; in particular, parks were designed to incorporate landscapes whose elements were related to each other.


title: Central Park

text: A New York City icon, Central Park is the most filmed location in the world. A December 2017 report found that 231 movies had used it for on-location shoots, more than the 160 movies that had filmed in Greenwich Village or the 99 movies that had filmed in Times Square. Some of the movies filmed at Central Park, such as the 1993 film "The Age of Innocence", reflect ideals of the past. Other films, including "The Fisher King" (1991), "Marathon Man" (1976), "The Out of Towners" (1970), and "" (1992), use the park for dramatic conflict scenes. Central Park has been used in romance films such as "Maid in Manhattan" (2002), "13 Going on 30" (2004) or "Hitch" (2005), and fantasy live-action/animated films such as "Enchanted" (2007). In 2009, an estimated 4,000 days of film shoots were hosted, or an average of more than ten film shoots per day, accounting for $135.5 million in city revenue.


title: Central Park

text: Because of its cultural and historical significance, Central Park has been a National Historic Landmark since 1962, and a New York City designated scenic landmark since 1974. It was placed on UNESCO's list of tentative World Heritage Sites in 2017.


title: Central Park

text: The value of the surrounding land started rising significantly in the mid-1860s during the park's construction. The completion of Central Park immediately increased the surrounding area's real estate prices, in some cases by up to 700 percent between 1858 and 1870. It also resulted in the creation of the zoning plan in Upper Manhattan. Upscale districts grew on both sides of Central Park following its completion. On the Upper East Side, a portion of Fifth Avenue abutting lower Central Park became known as "Millionaires' Row" by the 1890s, due to the concentration of wealthy families in the area. The Upper West Side took longer to develop, but row houses and luxury apartment buildings came to predominate the neighborhood, and some were later included in the Central Park West Historic District. Though most of the city's rich formerly lived in mansions, they moved into apartments close to Central Park during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.


title: Central Park

text: During the late 20th century, until Central Park's restoration in the 1990s, proximity to the park did not have a significant positive effect on real estate values. Following Central Park's restoration, some of the city's most expensive properties have been sold or rented near the park. The value of the land in Central Park was estimated to be about $528.8 billion in December 2005, though this was based on the park's impact on the average value of nearby land.


title: Central Park

text: In the modern day, it is estimated that Central Park has resulted in billions of dollars in economic impact. A 2009 study found that the city received annual tax revenue of more than $656 million, visitors spent more than $395 million due to the park, in-park businesses such as concessions generated , and the 4,000 hours of annual film shoots and other photography generated of economic output. In 2013, about 550,000 people lived within a ten-minute walk (about ) of the park's boundaries, and 1.15 million more people could get to the park within a half-hour subway ride.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, Australia, and Japan after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent states. The Bretton Woods system required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars to within 1% of fixed parity rates, with the dollar convertible to gold bullion for foreign governments and central banks at US$35 per troy ounce of fine gold (or 0.88867 gram fine gold per dollar). It also envisioned greater cooperation among countries in order to prevent future competitive devaluations, and thus established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to monitor exchange rates and lend reserve currencies to nations with balance of payments deficits.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Preparing to rebuild the international economic system while World War II was still being fought, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, also known as the Bretton Woods Conference. The delegates deliberated from 1 to 22 July 1944, and signed the Bretton Woods agreement on its final day. Setting up a system of rules, institutions, and procedures to regulate the international monetary system, these accords established the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which today is part of the World Bank Group. The United States, which controlled two-thirds of the world's gold, insisted that the Bretton Woods system rest on both gold and the US dollar. Soviet representatives attended the conference but later declined to ratify the final agreements, charging that the institutions they had created were "branches of Wall Street". These organizations became operational in 1945 after a sufficient number of countries had ratified the agreement. According to Barry Eichengreen, the Bretton Woods system operated successfully due to three factors: "low international capital mobility, tight financial regulation, and the dominant economic and financial position of the United States and the dollar."


title: Bretton Woods system

text: On 15 August 1971, the United States terminated convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end and rendering the dollar a fiat currency. Shortly thereafter, many fixed currencies (such as the pound sterling) also became free-floating, and the subsequent era has been characterized by floating exchange rates. The end of Bretton Woods was formally ratified by the Jamaica Accords in 1976.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The political basis for the Bretton Woods system was in the confluence of two key conditions: the shared experiences of two World Wars, with the sense that failure to deal with economic problems after the first war had led to the second; and the concentration of power in a small number of states.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: There was a high level of agreement among the powerful nations that failure to coordinate exchange rates during the interwar period had exacerbated political tensions. This facilitated the decisions reached by the Bretton Woods Conference. Furthermore, all the participating governments at Bretton Woods agreed that the monetary chaos of the interwar period had yielded several valuable lessons.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The experience of World War I was fresh in the minds of public officials. The planners at Bretton Woods hoped to avoid a repetition of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, which had created enough economic and political tension to lead to WWII. After World War I, Britain owed the U.S. substantial sums, which Britain could not repay because it had used the funds to support allies such as France during the War; the Allies could not pay back Britain, so Britain could not pay back the U.S. The solution at Versailles for the French, British, and Americans seemed to entail ultimately charging Germany for the debts. If the demands on Germany were unrealistic, then it was unrealistic for France to pay back Britain, and for Britain to pay back the US. Thus, many "assets" on bank balance sheets internationally were actually unrecoverable loans, which culminated in the 1931 banking crisis. Intransigent insistence by creditor nations for the repayment of Allied war debts and reparations, combined with an inclination to isolationism, led to a breakdown of the international financial system and a worldwide economic depression. The so-called "beggar thy neighbor" policies that emerged as the crisis continued saw some trading nations using currency devaluations in an attempt to increase their competitiveness (i.e. raise exports and lower imports), though recent research suggests this de facto inflationary policy probably offset some of the contractionary forces in world price levels (see Eichengreen "How to Prevent a Currency War").


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In the 1920s, international flows of speculative financial capital increased, leading to extremes in balance of payments situations in various European countries and the US. In the 1930s, world markets never broke through the barriers and restrictions on international trade and investment volume – barriers haphazardly constructed, nationally motivated and imposed. The various anarchic and often autarkic protectionist and neo-mercantilist national policies – often mutually inconsistent – that emerged over the first half of the decade worked inconsistently and self-defeatingly to promote national import substitution, increase national exports, divert foreign investment and trade flows, and even prevent certain categories of cross-border trade and investment outright. Global central bankers attempted to manage the situation by meeting with each other, but their understanding of the situation as well as difficulties in communicating internationally, hindered their abilities. The lesson was that simply having responsible, hard-working central bankers was not enough.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Britain in the 1930s had an exclusionary trade bloc with nations of the British Empire known as the "Sterling Area". If Britain imported more than it exported to such nations, recipients of pounds sterling within these nations tended to put them into London banks. This meant that though Britain was running a trade deficit, it had a financial account surplus, and payments balanced. Increasingly, Britain's positive balance of payments required keeping the wealth of Empire nations in British banks. One incentive for, say, South African holders of rand to park their wealth in London and to keep the money in Sterling, was a strongly valued pound sterling. In the 1920s, imports from the US threatened certain parts of the British domestic market for manufactured goods and the way out of the trade deficit was to devalue the currency. But Britain couldn't devalue, or the Empire surplus would leave its banking system.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Nazi Germany also worked with a bloc of controlled nations by 1940. Germany forced trading partners with a surplus to spend that surplus importing products from Germany. Thus, Britain survived by keeping Sterling nation surpluses in its banking system, and Germany survived by forcing trading partners to purchase its own products. The U.S. was concerned that a sudden drop-off in war spending might return the nation to unemployment levels of the 1930s, and so wanted Sterling nations and everyone in Europe to be able to import from the US, hence the U.S. supported free trade and international convertibility of currencies into gold or dollars.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: When many of the same experts who observed the 1930s became the architects of a new, unified, post-war system at Bretton Woods, their guiding principles became "no more beggar thy neighbor" and "control flows of speculative financial capital". Preventing a repetition of this process of competitive devaluations was desired, but in a way that would not force debtor nations to contract their industrial bases by keeping interest rates at a level high enough to attract foreign bank deposits. John Maynard Keynes, wary of repeating the Great Depression, was behind Britain's proposal that surplus nations be forced by a "use-it-or-lose-it" mechanism, to either import from debtor nations, build factories in debtor nations or donate to debtor nations. The U.S. opposed Keynes' plan, and a senior official at the U.S. Treasury, Harry Dexter White, rejected Keynes' proposals, in favor of an International Monetary Fund with enough resources to counteract destabilizing flows of speculative finance. However, unlike the modern IMF, White's proposed fund would have counteracted dangerous speculative flows automatically, with no political strings attached—i.e., no IMF conditionality. Economic historian Brad Delong writes that on almost every point where he was overruled by the Americans, Keynes was later proved correct by events.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Today these key 1930s events look different to scholars of the era (see the work of Barry Eichengreen "Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939" and "How to Prevent a Currency War"); in particular, devaluations today are viewed with more nuance. Ben Bernanke's opinion on the subject follows:


title: Bretton Woods system

text: ... [T]he proximate cause of the world depression was a structurally flawed and poorly managed international gold standard. ... For a variety of reasons, including a desire of the Federal Reserve to curb the U.S. stock market boom, monetary policy in several major countries turned contractionary in the late 1920s—a contraction that was transmitted worldwide by the gold standard. What was initially a mild deflationary process began to snowball when the banking and currency crises of 1931 instigated an international "scramble for gold". Sterilization of gold inflows by surplus countries [the U.S. and France], substitution of gold for foreign exchange reserves, and runs on commercial banks all led to increases in the gold backing of money, and consequently to sharp unintended declines in national money supplies. Monetary contractions in turn were strongly associated with falling prices, output and employment. Effective international cooperation could in principle have permitted a worldwide monetary expansion despite gold standard constraints, but disputes over World War I reparations and war debts, and the insularity and inexperience of the Federal Reserve, among other factors, prevented this outcome. As a result, individual countries were able to escape the deflationary vortex only by unilaterally abandoning the gold standard and re-establishing domestic monetary stability, a process that dragged on in a halting and uncoordinated manner until France and the other Gold Bloc countries finally left gold in 1936. —"Great Depression", B. Bernanke


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In 1944 at Bretton Woods, as a result of the collective conventional wisdom of the time, representatives from all the leading allied nations collectively favored a regulated system of fixed exchange rates, indirectly disciplined by a US dollar tied to gold—a system that relied on a regulated market economy with tight controls on the values of currencies. Flows of speculative international finance were curtailed by shunting them through and limiting them via central banks. This meant that international flows of investment went into foreign direct investment (FDI)—i.e., construction of factories overseas, rather than international currency manipulation or bond markets. Although the national experts disagreed to some degree on the specific implementation of this system, all agreed on the need for tight controls.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Also based on experience of the inter-war years, U.S. planners developed a concept of economic security—that a liberal international economic system would enhance the possibilities of postwar peace. One of those who saw such a security link was Cordell Hull, the United States Secretary of State from 1933 to 1944. Hull believed that the fundamental causes of the two world wars lay in economic discrimination and trade warfare. Hull argued


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The developed countries also agreed that the liberal international economic system required governmental intervention. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, public management of the economy had emerged as a primary activity of governments in the developed states. Employment, stability, and growth were now important subjects of public policy.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In turn, the role of government in the national economy had become associated with the assumption by the state of the responsibility for assuring its citizens of a degree of economic well-being. The system of economic protection for at-risk citizens sometimes called the welfare state grew out of the Great Depression, which created a popular demand for governmental intervention in the economy, and out of the theoretical contributions of the Keynesian school of economics, which asserted the need for governmental intervention to counter market imperfections.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: However, increased government intervention in domestic economy brought with it isolationist sentiment that had a profoundly negative effect on international economics. The priority of national goals, independent national action in the interwar period, and the failure to perceive that those national goals could not be realized without some form of international collaboration—all resulted in "beggar-thy-neighbor" policies such as high tariffs, competitive devaluations that contributed to the breakdown of the gold-based international monetary system, domestic political instability, and international war. The lesson learned was, as the principal architect of the Bretton Woods system New Dealer Harry Dexter White put it:


title: Bretton Woods system

text: To ensure economic stability and political peace, states agreed to cooperate to closely regulate the production of their currencies to maintain fixed exchange rates between countries with the aim of more easily facilitating international trade. This was the foundation of the U.S. vision of postwar world free trade, which also involved lowering tariffs and, among other things, maintaining a balance of trade via fixed exchange rates that would be favorable to the capitalist system.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Thus, the more developed market economies agreed with the U.S. vision of post-war international economic management, which intended to create and maintain an effective international monetary system and foster the reduction of barriers to trade and capital flows. In a sense, the new international monetary system was a return to a system similar to the pre-war gold standard, only using U.S. dollars as the world's new reserve currency until international trade reallocated the world's gold supply.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Thus, the new system would be devoid (initially) of governments meddling with their currency supply as they had during the years of economic turmoil preceding WWII. Instead, governments would closely police the production of their currencies and ensure that they would not artificially manipulate their price levels. If anything, Bretton Woods was a return to a time devoid of increased governmental intervention in economies and currency systems.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The Atlantic Charter, drafted during U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's August 1941 meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on a ship in the North Atlantic, was the most notable precursor to the Bretton Woods Conference. Like Woodrow Wilson before him, whose "Fourteen Points" had outlined U.S. aims in the aftermath of the First World War, Roosevelt set forth a range of ambitious goals for the postwar world even before the U.S. had entered the Second World War.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The Atlantic Charter affirmed the right of all nations to equal access to trade and raw materials. Moreover, the charter called for freedom of the seas (a principal U.S. foreign policy aim since France and Britain had first threatened U.S. shipping in the 1790s), the disarmament of aggressors, and the "establishment of a wider and more permanent system of general security".


title: Bretton Woods system

text: As the war drew to a close, the Bretton Woods conference was the culmination of some two and a half years of planning for postwar reconstruction by the Treasuries of the U.S. and the UK. U.S. representatives studied with their British counterparts the reconstitution of what had been lacking between the two world wars: a system of international payments that would let nations trade without fear of sudden currency depreciation or wild exchange rate fluctuations—ailments that had nearly paralyzed world capitalism during the Great Depression.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Without a strong European market for U.S. goods and services, most policymakers believed, the U.S. economy would be unable to sustain the prosperity it had achieved during the war. In addition, U.S. unions had only grudgingly accepted government-imposed restraints on their demands during the war, but they were willing to wait no longer, particularly as inflation cut into the existing wage scales with painful force. (By the end of 1945, there had already been major strikes in the automobile, electrical, and steel industries.)


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In early 1945, Bernard Baruch described the spirit of Bretton Woods as: if we can "stop subsidization of labor and sweated competition in the export markets", as well as prevent rebuilding of war machines, "oh boy, oh boy, what long term prosperity we will have." The United States could therefore use its position of influence to reopen and control the rules of the world economy, so as to give unhindered access to all nations' markets and materials.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: United States allies—economically exhausted by the war—needed U.S. assistance to rebuild their domestic production and to finance their international trade; indeed, they needed it to survive.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Before the war, the French and the British realized that they could no longer compete with U.S. industries in an open marketplace. During the 1930s, the British created their own economic bloc to shut out U.S. goods. Churchill did not believe that he could surrender that protection after the war, so he watered down the Atlantic Charter's "free access" clause before agreeing to it.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Yet U.S. officials were determined to open their access to the British empire. The combined value of British and U.S. trade was well over half of all the world's trade in goods. For the U.S. to open global markets, it first had to split the British (trade) empire. While Britain had economically dominated the 19th century, U.S. officials intended the second half of the 20th to be under U.S. hegemony.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: A devastated Britain had little choice. Two world wars had destroyed the country's principal industries that paid for the importation of half of the nation's food and nearly all its raw materials except coal. The British had no choice but to ask for aid. Not until the United States signed an agreement on 6 December 1945 to grant Britain aid of $4.4 billion did the British Parliament ratify the Bretton Woods Agreements (which occurred later in December 1945).


title: Bretton Woods system

text: For nearly two centuries, French and U.S. interests had clashed in both the Old World and the New World. During the war, French mistrust of the United States was embodied by General Charles de Gaulle, president of the French provisional government. De Gaulle bitterly fought U.S. officials as he tried to maintain his country's colonies and diplomatic freedom of action. In turn, U.S. officials saw de Gaulle as a political extremist.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: But in 1945 de Gaulle—the leading voice of French nationalism—was forced to grudgingly ask the U.S. for a billion-dollar loan. Most of the request was granted; in return France promised to curtail government subsidies and currency manipulation that had given its exporters advantages in the world market.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Free trade relied on the free convertibility of currencies. Negotiators at the Bretton Woods conference, fresh from what they perceived as a disastrous experience with floating rates in the 1930s, concluded that major monetary fluctuations could stall the free flow of trade.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The new economic system required an accepted vehicle for investment, trade, and payments. Unlike national economies, however, the international economy lacks a central government that can issue currency and manage its use. In the past this problem had been solved through the gold standard, but the architects of Bretton Woods did not consider this option feasible for the postwar political economy. Instead, they set up a system of fixed exchange rates managed by a series of newly created international institutions using the U.S. dollar (which was a gold standard currency for central banks) as a reserve currency.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In the 19th and early 20th centuries gold played a key role in international monetary transactions. The gold standard was used to back currencies; the international value of currency was determined by its fixed relationship to gold; gold was used to settle international accounts. The gold standard maintained fixed exchange rates that were seen as desirable because they reduced the risk when trading with other countries.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Imbalances in international trade were theoretically rectified automatically by the gold standard. A country with a deficit would have depleted gold reserves and would thus have to reduce its money supply. The resulting fall in demand would reduce imports and the lowering of prices would boost exports; thus the deficit would be rectified. Any country experiencing inflation would lose gold and therefore would have a decrease in the amount of money available to spend.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: This decrease in the amount of money would act to reduce the inflationary pressure. Supplementing the use of gold in this period was the British pound. Based on the dominant British economy, the pound became a reserve, transaction, and intervention currency. But the pound was not up to the challenge of serving as the primary world currency, given the weakness of the British economy after the Second World War.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The architects of Bretton Woods had conceived of a system wherein exchange rate stability was a prime goal. Yet, in an era of more activist economic policy, governments did not seriously consider permanently fixed rates on the model of the classical gold standard of the 19th century. Gold production was not even sufficient to meet the demands of growing international trade and investment. Further, a sizable share of the world's known gold reserves were located in the Soviet Union, which would later emerge as a Cold War rival to the United States and Western Europe.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The only currency strong enough to meet the rising demands for international currency transactions was the U.S. dollar. The strength of the U.S. economy, the fixed relationship of the dollar to gold ($35 an ounce), and the commitment of the U.S. government to convert dollars into gold at that price made the dollar as good as gold. In fact, the dollar was even better than gold: it earned interest and it was more flexible than gold.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The rules of Bretton Woods, set forth in the articles of agreement of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), provided for a system of fixed exchange rates. The rules further sought to encourage an open system by committing members to the convertibility of their respective currencies into other currencies and to free trade.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: What emerged was the "pegged rate" currency regime. Members were required to establish a parity of their national currencies in terms of the reserve currency (a "peg") and to maintain exchange rates within plus or minus 1% of parity (a "band") by intervening in their foreign exchange markets (that is, buying or selling foreign money).


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In theory, the reserve currency would be the bancor (a World Currency Unit that was never implemented), proposed by John Maynard Keynes; however, the United States objected and their request was granted, making the "reserve currency" the U.S. dollar. This meant that other countries would peg their currencies to the U.S. dollar, and—once convertibility was restored—would buy and sell U.S. dollars to keep market exchange rates within plus or minus 1% of parity. Thus, the U.S. dollar took over the role that gold had played under the gold standard in the international financial system.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Meanwhile, to bolster confidence in the dollar, the U.S. agreed separately to link the dollar to gold at the rate of $35 per ounce. At this rate, foreign governments and central banks could exchange dollars for gold. Bretton Woods established a system of payments based on the dollar, which defined all currencies in relation to the dollar, itself convertible into gold, and above all, "as good as gold" for trade. U.S. currency was now effectively the world currency, the standard to which every other currency was pegged. As the world's key currency, most international transactions were denominated in U.S. dollars.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The U.S. dollar was the currency with the most purchasing power and it was the only currency that was backed by gold. Additionally, all European nations that had been involved in World War II were highly in debt and transferred large amounts of gold into the United States, a fact that contributed to the supremacy of the United States. Thus, the U.S. dollar was strongly appreciated in the rest of the world and therefore became the key currency of the Bretton Woods system.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Member countries could only change their par value by more than 10% with IMF approval, which was contingent on IMF determination that its balance of payments was in a "fundamental disequilibrium". The formal definition of fundamental disequilibrium was never determined, leading to uncertainty of approvals and attempts to repeatedly devalue by less than 10% instead. Any country that changed without approval or after being denied approval was denied access to the IMF.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The Bretton Woods Conference led to the establishment of the IMF and the IBRD (now the World Bank), which remain powerful forces in the world economy as of the 2020s.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: A major point of common ground at the Conference was the goal to avoid a recurrence of the closed markets and economic warfare that had characterized the 1930s. Thus, negotiators at Bretton Woods also agreed that there was a need for an institutional forum for international cooperation on monetary matters. Already in 1944 the British economist John Maynard Keynes emphasized "the importance of rule-based regimes to stabilize business expectations"—something he accepted in the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. Currency troubles in the interwar years, it was felt, had been greatly exacerbated by the absence of any established procedure or machinery for intergovernmental consultation.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: As a result of the establishment of agreed upon structures and rules of international economic interaction, conflict over economic issues was minimized, and the significance of the economic aspect of international relations seemed to recede.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Officially established on 27 December 1945, when the 29 participating countries at the conference of Bretton Woods signed its Articles of Agreement, the IMF was to be the keeper of the rules and the main instrument of public international management. The Fund commenced its financial operations on 1 March 1947. IMF approval was necessary for any change in exchange rates in excess of 10%. It advised countries on policies affecting the monetary system and lent reserve currencies to nations that had incurred balance of payment debts.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The big question at the Bretton Woods conference with respect to the institution that would emerge as the IMF was the issue of future access to international liquidity and whether that source should be akin to a world central bank able to create new reserves at will or a more limited borrowing mechanism.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Although attended by 44 nations, discussions at the conference were dominated by two rival plans developed by the United States and Britain. Writing to the British Treasury, Keynes, who took the lead at the Conference, did not want many countries. He believed that those from the colonies and semi-colonies had "nothing to contribute and will merely encumber the ground."


title: Bretton Woods system

text: As the chief international economist at the U.S. Treasury in 1942–44, Harry Dexter White drafted the U.S. blueprint for international access to liquidity, which competed with the plan drafted for the British Treasury by Keynes. Overall, White's scheme tended to favor incentives designed to create price stability within the world's economies, while Keynes wanted a system that encouraged economic growth. The "collective agreement was an enormous international undertaking" that took two years prior to the conference to prepare for. It consisted of numerous bilateral and multilateral meetings to reach common ground on what policies would make up the Bretton Woods system.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: At the time, gaps between the White and Keynes plans seemed enormous. White basically wanted a fund to reverse destabilizing flows of financial capital automatically. White proposed a new monetary institution called the Stabilization Fund that "would be funded with a finite pool of national currencies and gold… that would effectively limit the supply of reserve credit". Keynes wanted incentives for the U.S. to help Britain and the rest of Europe rebuild after WWII. Outlining the difficulty of creating a system that every nation could accept in his speech at the closing plenary session of the Bretton Woods conference on 22 July 1944, Keynes stated:


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Keynes' proposals would have established a world reserve currency (which he thought might be called "bancor") administered by a central bank vested with the power to create money and with the authority to take actions on a much larger scale.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In the case of balance of payments imbalances, Keynes recommended that "both" debtors and creditors should change their policies. As outlined by Keynes, countries with payment surpluses should increase their imports from the deficit countries, build factories in debtor nations, or donate to them—and thereby create a foreign trade equilibrium. Thus, Keynes was sensitive to the problem that placing too much of the burden on the deficit country would be deflationary.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: But the United States, as a likely creditor nation, and eager to take on the role of the world's economic powerhouse, used White's plan but targeted many of Keynes's concerns. White saw a role for global intervention in an imbalance only when it was caused by currency speculation.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Although a compromise was reached on some points, because of the overwhelming economic and military power of the United States the participants at Bretton Woods largely agreed on White's plan. White’s plan was designed not merely to secure the rise and world economic domination of the United States, but to ensure that as the outgoing superpower Britain would be shuffled even further from centre stage.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: What emerged largely reflected U.S. preferences: a system of subscriptions and quotas embedded in the IMF, which itself was to be no more than a fixed pool of national currencies and gold subscribed by each country, as opposed to a world central bank capable of creating money. The Fund was charged with managing various nations' trade deficits so that they would not produce currency devaluations that would trigger a decline in imports.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The IMF is provided with a fund composed of contributions from member countries in gold and their own currencies. The original quotas were to total $8.8 billion. When joining the IMF, members are assigned "quotas" that reflect their relative economic power—and, as a sort of credit deposit, are obliged to pay a "subscription" of an amount commensurate with the quota. They pay the subscription as 25% in gold or currency convertible into gold (effectively the dollar, which at the founding, was the only currency then still directly gold convertible for central banks) and 75% in their own currency.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Quota subscriptions form the largest source of money at the IMF's disposal. The IMF set out to use this money to grant loans to member countries with financial difficulties. Each member is then entitled to withdraw 25% of its quota immediately in case of payment problems. If this sum should be insufficient, each nation in the system is also able to request loans for foreign currency.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In the event of a deficit in the current account, Fund members, when short of reserves, would be able to borrow foreign currency in amounts determined by the size of its quota. In other words, the higher the country's contribution was, the higher the sum of money it could borrow from the IMF.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Members were required to pay back debts within a period of 18 months to five years. In turn, the IMF embarked on setting up rules and procedures to keep a country from going too deeply into debt year after year. The Fund would exercise "surveillance" over other economies for the U.S. Treasury in return for its loans to prop up national currencies.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: IMF loans were not comparable to loans issued by a conventional credit institution. Instead, they were effectively a chance to purchase a foreign currency with gold or the member's national currency.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The U.S.-backed IMF plan sought to end restrictions on the transfer of goods and services from one country to another, eliminate currency blocs, and lift currency exchange controls.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The IMF was designed to advance credits to countries with balance of payments deficits. Short-run balance of payment difficulties would be overcome by IMF loans, which would facilitate stable currency exchange rates. This flexibility meant a member state would not have to induce a depression to cut its national income down to such a low level that its imports would finally fall within its means. Thus, countries were to be spared the need to resort to the classical medicine of deflating themselves into drastic unemployment when faced with chronic balance of payments deficits. Before the Second World War, European nations—particularly Britain—often resorted to this.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The IMF sought to provide for occasional discontinuous exchange-rate adjustments (changing a member's par value) by international agreement. Member nations were permitted to adjust their currency exchange rate by 1%. This tended to restore equilibrium in their trade by expanding their exports and contracting imports. This would be allowed only if there was a fundamental disequilibrium. A decrease in the value of a country's money was called a devaluation, while an increase in the value of the country's money was called a revaluation.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: It was envisioned that these changes in exchange rates would be quite rare. However, the concept of fundamental disequilibrium, though key to the operation of the par value system, was never defined in detail.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Never before had international monetary cooperation been attempted on a permanent institutional basis. Even more groundbreaking was the decision to allocate voting rights among governments, not on a one-state one-vote basis, but rather in proportion to quotas. Since the United States was contributing the most, U.S. leadership was the key. Under the system of weighted voting, the United States exerted a preponderant influence on the IMF. The United States held one-third of all IMF quotas at the outset, enough on its own to veto all changes to the IMF Charter.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In addition, the IMF was based in Washington, D.C., and staffed mainly by U.S. economists. It regularly exchanged personnel with the U.S. Treasury. When the IMF began operations in 1946, President Harry S. Truman named White as its first U.S. Executive Director. Since no Deputy Managing Director post had yet been created, White served occasionally as Acting Managing Director and generally played a highly influential role during the IMF's first year. Truman had to abandon his original plan of naming White as IMF Executive Director when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover submitted a report to the president, asserting that White was "a valuable adjunct to an underground Soviet espionage organization", who was placing individuals of high regard to Soviet intelligence inside the government.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The agreement made no provisions to create international reserves. It assumed new gold production would be sufficient. In the event of structural disequilibria, it expected that there would be national solutions, for example, an adjustment in the value of the currency or an improvement by other means of a country's competitive position. The IMF was left with few means, however, to encourage such national solutions.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Economists and other planners recognized in 1944 that the new system could only commence after a return to normality following the disruption of World War II. It was expected that after a brief transition period of no more than five years, the international economy would recover and the system would enter into operation.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: To promote growth of world trade and finance postwar reconstruction of Europe, the planners at Bretton Woods created another institution, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which is one of five agencies that make up the World Bank Group, and is perhaps now the most important agency of the Group. The IBRD had an authorized capitalization of $10 billion and was expected to make loans of its own funds to underwrite private loans and to issue securities to raise new funds to make possible a speedy postwar recovery. The IBRD was to be a specialized agency of the United Nations, charged with making loans for economic development purposes.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The Bretton Woods arrangements were largely adhered to and ratified by the participating governments. It was expected that national monetary reserves, supplemented with necessary IMF credits, would finance any temporary balance of payments disequilibria. But this did not prove sufficient to get Europe out of its conundrum.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Postwar world capitalism suffered from a dollar shortage. The United States was running large balance of trade surpluses, and U.S. reserves were immense and growing. It was necessary to reverse this flow. Even though all nations wanted to buy U.S. exports, dollars had to leave the United States and become available for international use so they could do so. In other words, the United States would have to reverse the imbalances in global wealth by running a balance of trade deficit, financed by an outflow of U.S. reserves to other nations (a U.S. financial account deficit). The U.S. could run a financial deficit by either importing from, building plants in, or donating to foreign nations. Speculative investment was discouraged by the Bretton Woods agreement, and importing from other nations was not appealing in the 1950s, because U.S. technology was cutting edge at the time. So, multinational corporations and global aid that originated from the U.S. burgeoned.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The modest credit facilities of the IMF were clearly insufficient to deal with Western Europe's huge balance of payments deficits. The problem was further aggravated by the reaffirmation by the IMF Board of Governors of the provision in the Bretton Woods Articles of Agreement that the IMF could make loans only for current account deficits and not for capital and reconstruction purposes. Only the United States contribution of $570 million was actually available for IBRD lending. In addition, because the only available market for IBRD bonds was the conservative Wall Street banking market, the IBRD was forced to adopt a conservative lending policy, granting loans only when repayment was assured. Given these problems, by 1947 the IMF and the IBRD themselves were admitting that they could not deal with the international monetary system's economic problems.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The United States set up the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan) to provide large-scale financial and economic aid for rebuilding Europe largely through grants rather than loans. Countries belonging to the Soviet bloc, e.g., Poland were invited to receive the grants, but were given a favorable agreement with the Soviet Union's COMECON. In a speech at Harvard University on 5 June 1947, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall stated:


title: Bretton Woods system

text: From 1947 until 1958, the U.S. deliberately encouraged an outflow of dollars, and, from 1950 on, the United States ran a balance of payments deficit with the intent of providing liquidity for the international economy. Dollars flowed out through various U.S. aid programs: the Truman Doctrine entailing aid to the pro-U.S. Greek and Turkish regimes, which were struggling to suppress communist revolution, aid to various pro-U.S. regimes in the Third World, and most importantly, the Marshall Plan. From 1948 to 1954 the United States provided 16 Western European countries with $17 billion in grants.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: To encourage long-term adjustment, the United States promoted European and Japanese trade competitiveness. Policies for economic controls on the defeated former Axis countries were scrapped. Aid to Europe and Japan was designed to rebuild productivity and export capacity. In the long run it was expected that such European and Japanese recovery would benefit the United States by widening markets for U.S. exports, and providing locations for U.S. capital expansion.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill prepared the postwar era by negotiating with Joseph Stalin at Yalta about respective zones of influence; this same year Germany was divided into four occupation zones (Soviet, American, British, and French).


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau insisted that the Big Four (United States, United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China) participate in the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, but their plans were frustrated when the Soviet Union would not join the IMF. The reasons why the Soviet Union chose not to subscribe to the articles by December 1945 have been the subject of speculation. But since the release of the relevant documents from the Soviet archives, it is clear that the Soviet calculation was based on the behavior of the parties that had given their assent to the Bretton Woods Agreements. The extended debates about ratification that had taken place both in the UK and the U.S. were read in Moscow as evidence of the quick disintegration of the wartime alliance.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Facing the Soviet Union, whose power had also strengthened and whose territorial influence had expanded, the U.S. assumed the role of leader of the capitalist camp. The rise of the postwar U.S. as the world's leading industrial, monetary, and military power was rooted in the fact that the mainland U.S. was untouched by the war, in the instability of the nation states of postwar Europe, and the wartime devastation of the Soviet and European economies.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Despite the economic cost implied by such a policy, being at the center of the international market gave the U.S. unprecedented freedom of action in pursuing its foreign affairs goals. A trade surplus made it easier to keep armies abroad and to invest outside the U.S., and because other nations could not sustain foreign deployments, the U.S. had the power to decide why, when and how to intervene in global crises. The dollar continued to function as a compass to guide the health of the world economy, and exporting to the U.S. became the primary economic goal of developing or redeveloping economies. This arrangement came to be referred to as the "Pax Americana", in analogy to the "Pax Britannica" of the late 19th century and the "Pax Romana" of the first. ("See" Globalism)


title: Bretton Woods system

text: After the end of World War II, the U.S. held $26 billion in gold reserves, of an estimated total of $40 billion (approx 65%). As world trade increased rapidly through the 1950s, the size of the gold base increased by only a few percentage points. In 1950, the U.S. balance of payments swung negative. The first U.S. response to the crisis was in the late 1950s when the Eisenhower administration placed import quotas on oil and other restrictions on trade outflows. More drastic measures were proposed, but not acted upon. However, with a mounting recession that began in 1958, this response alone was not sustainable. In 1960, with Kennedy's election, a decade-long effort to maintain the Bretton Woods System at the $35/ounce price began.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The design of the Bretton Woods System was such that nations could only enforce convertibility to gold for the anchor currency—the United States dollar. Conversion of dollars to gold was allowed but was not required. Nations could forgo converting dollars to gold, and instead hold dollars. Rather than full convertibility, the system provided a fixed price for sales between central banks. However, there was still an open gold market. For the Bretton Woods system to remain workable, it would either have to alter the peg of the dollar to gold, or it would have to maintain the free market price for gold near the $35 per ounce official price. The greater the gap between free market gold prices and central bank gold prices, the greater the temptation to deal with internal economic issues by buying gold at the Bretton Woods price and selling it on the open market.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In 1960 Robert Triffin, a Belgian-American economist, noticed that holding dollars was more valuable than gold because constant U.S. balance of payments deficits helped to keep the system liquid and fuel economic growth. What would later come to be known as Triffin's Dilemma was predicted when Triffin noted that if the U.S. failed to keep running deficits the system would lose its liquidity, not be able to keep up with the world's economic growth, and, thus, bring the system to a halt. But incurring such payment deficits also meant that, over time, the deficits would erode confidence in the dollar as the reserve currency created instability.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The first effort was the creation of the London Gold Pool on 1 November 1961 between eight nations. The theory behind the pool was that spikes in the free market price of gold, set by the morning gold fix in London, could be controlled by having a pool of gold to sell on the open market, that would then be recovered when the price of gold dropped. Gold's price spiked in response to events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other less significant events, to as high as $40/ounce. The Kennedy administration drafted a radical change of the tax system to spur more production capacity and thus encourage exports. This culminated with the 1963 tax cut program, designed to maintain the $35 peg.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In 1967, there was an attack on the pound and a run on gold in the sterling area, and on 18 November 1967, the British government was forced to devalue the pound. U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson was faced with a difficult choice, either institute protectionist measures, including travel taxes, export subsidies and slashing the budget—or accept the risk of a "run on gold" and the dollar. From Johnson's perspective: "The world supply of gold is insufficient to make the present system workable—particularly as the use of the dollar as a reserve currency is essential to create the required international liquidity to sustain world trade and growth."


title: Bretton Woods system

text: He believed that the priorities of the United States were correct, and, although there were internal tensions in the Western alliance, that turning away from open trade would be more costly, economically and politically, than it was worth: "Our role of world leadership in a political and military sense is the only reason for our current embarrassment in an economic sense on the one hand and on the other the correction of the economic embarrassment under present monetary systems will result in an untenable position economically for our allies."


title: Bretton Woods system

text: While West Germany agreed not to purchase gold from the U.S., and agreed to hold dollars instead, the pressure on both the dollar and the pound sterling continued. In January 1968 Johnson imposed a series of measures designed to end gold outflow, and to increase U.S. exports. This was unsuccessful, however, as in mid-March 1968 a dollar run on gold ensued through the free market in London, the London Gold Pool was dissolved, initially by the institution of "ad hoc" UK bank holidays at the request of the U.S. government. This was followed by a full closure of the London gold market, also at the request of the U.S. government, until a series of meetings were held that attempted to rescue or reform the existing system.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: All attempts to maintain the peg collapsed in November 1968, and a new policy program attempted to convert the Bretton Woods system into an enforcement mechanism of floating the gold peg, which would be set by either "fiat" policy or by a restriction to honor foreign accounts. The collapse of the gold pool and the refusal of the pool members to trade gold with private entities—on 18 March 1968 the Congress of the United States repealed the 25% requirement of gold backing of the dollar—as well as the U.S. pledge to suspend gold sales to governments that trade in the private markets, led to the expansion of the private markets for international gold trade, in which the price of gold rose much higher than the official dollar price.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: U.S. gold reserves remained depleted due to the actions of some nations, notably France, which continued to build up their own gold reserves.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In the 1960s and 1970s, important structural changes eventually led to the breakdown of international monetary management. One change was the development of a high level of monetary interdependence. The stage was set for monetary interdependence by the return to convertibility of the Western European currencies at the end of 1958 and of the Japanese yen in 1964. Convertibility facilitated the vast expansion of international financial transactions, which deepened monetary interdependence.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Another aspect of the internationalization of banking has been the emergence of international banking consortia. Since 1964 various banks had formed international syndicates, and by 1971 over three-quarters of the world's largest banks had become shareholders in such syndicates. Multinational banks can and do make large international transfers of capital not only for investment purposes but also for hedging and speculating against exchange rate fluctuations.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: These new forms of monetary interdependence made large capital flows possible. During the Bretton Woods era, countries were reluctant to alter exchange rates formally even in cases of structural disequilibria. Because such changes had a direct impact on certain domestic economic groups, they came to be seen as political risks for leaders. As a result, official exchange rates often became unrealistic in market terms, providing a virtually risk-free temptation for speculators. They could move from a weak to a strong currency hoping to reap profits when a revaluation occurred. If, however, monetary authorities managed to avoid revaluation, they could return to other currencies with no loss. The combination of risk-free speculation with the availability of large sums was highly destabilizing.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: A second structural change that undermined monetary management was the decline of U.S. hegemony. The U.S. was no longer the dominant economic power it had been for more than two decades. By the mid-1960s, the E.E.C. and Japan had become international economic powers in their own right. With total reserves exceeding those of the U.S., higher levels of growth and trade, and per capita income approaching that of the U.S., Europe and Japan were narrowing the gap between themselves and the United States.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The shift toward a more pluralistic distribution of economic power led to increasing dissatisfaction with the privileged role of the U.S. dollar as the international currency. Acting effectively as the world's central banker, the U.S., through its deficit, determined the level of international liquidity. In an increasingly interdependent world, U.S. policy significantly influenced economic conditions in Europe and Japan. In addition, as long as other countries were willing to hold dollars, the U.S. could carry out massive foreign expenditures for political purposes—military activities and foreign aid—without the threat of balance-of-payments constraints.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Dissatisfaction with the political implications of the dollar system was increased by "détente" between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The Soviet military threat had been an important force in cementing the U.S.-led monetary system. The U.S. political and security umbrella helped make American economic domination palatable for Europe and Japan, which had been economically exhausted by the war. As gross domestic production grew in European countries, trade grew. When common security tensions lessened, this loosened the transatlantic dependence on defence concerns, and allowed latent economic tensions to surface.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Reinforcing the relative decline in U.S. power and the dissatisfaction of Europe and Japan with the system was the continuing decline of the dollar—the foundation that had underpinned the post-1945 global trading system. The Vietnam War and the refusal of the administration of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson to pay for it and its Great Society programs through taxation resulted in an increased dollar outflow to pay for the military expenditures and rampant inflation, which led to the deterioration of the U.S. balance of trade position. In the late 1960s, the dollar was overvalued with its current trading position, while the German Mark and the yen were undervalued; and, naturally, the Germans and the Japanese had no desire to revalue and thereby make their exports more expensive, whereas the U.S. sought to maintain its international credibility by avoiding devaluation. Meanwhile, the pressure on government reserves was intensified by the new international currency markets, with their vast pools of speculative capital moving around in search of quick profits.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In contrast, upon the creation of Bretton Woods, with the U.S. producing half of the world's manufactured goods and holding half its reserves, the twin burdens of international management and the Cold War were possible to meet at first. Throughout the 1950s Washington sustained a balance of payments deficit to finance loans, aid, and troops for allied regimes. But during the 1960s the costs of doing so became less tolerable. By 1970 the U.S. held under 16% of international reserves. Adjustment to these changed realities was impeded by the U.S. commitment to fixed exchange rates and by the U.S. obligation to convert dollars into gold on demand.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: By 1968, the attempt to defend the dollar at a fixed peg of $35/ounce, the policy of the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations, had become increasingly untenable. Gold outflows from the U.S. accelerated, and despite gaining assurances from Germany and other nations to hold gold, the unbalanced spending of the Johnson administration had transformed the dollar shortage of the 1940s and 1950s into a dollar glut by the 1960s. In 1967, the IMF agreed in Rio de Janeiro to replace the tranche division set up in 1946. Special drawing rights (SDRs) were set as equal to one U.S. dollar, but were not usable for transactions other than between banks and the IMF. Nations were required to accept holding SDRs equal to three times their allotment, and interest would be charged, or credited, to each nation based on their SDR holding. The original interest rate was 1.5%.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The intent of the SDR system was to prevent nations from buying pegged gold and selling it at the higher free market price, and give nations a reason to hold dollars by crediting interest, at the same time setting a clear limit to the amount of dollars that could be held.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: A negative balance of payments, growing public debt incurred by the Vietnam War and Great Society programs, and monetary inflation by the Federal Reserve caused the dollar to become increasingly overvalued. The drain on U.S. gold reserves culminated with the London Gold Pool collapse in March 1968. By 1970, the U.S. had seen its gold coverage deteriorate from 55% to 22%. This, in the view of neoclassical economists, represented the point where holders of the dollar had lost faith in the ability of the U.S. to cut budget and trade deficits.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In 1971 more and more dollars were being printed in Washington, then being pumped overseas, to pay for government expenditure on the military and social programs. In the first six months of 1971, assets for $22 billion fled the U.S. In response, on 15 August 1971, Nixon issued pursuant to the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970, unilaterally imposing 90-day wage and price controls, a 10% import surcharge, and most importantly "closed the gold window", making the dollar inconvertible to gold directly, except on the open market. Unusually, this decision was made without consulting members of the international monetary system or even his own State Department, and was soon dubbed the "Nixon Shock".


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The August shock was followed by efforts under U.S. leadership to reform the international monetary system. Throughout the fall (autumn) of 1971, a series of multilateral and bilateral negotiations between the Group of Ten countries took place, seeking to redesign the exchange rate regime.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Meeting in December 1971 at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Group of Ten signed the Smithsonian Agreement. The U.S. pledged to peg the dollar at $38/ounce with 2.25% trading bands, and other countries agreed to appreciate their currencies versus the dollar. The group also planned to balance the world financial system using special drawing rights alone.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: The agreement failed to encourage discipline by the Federal Reserve or the United States government. The Federal Reserve was concerned about an increase in the domestic unemployment rate due to the devaluation of the dollar. In attempt to undermine the efforts of the Smithsonian Agreement, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates in pursuit of a previously established domestic policy objective of full national employment. With the Smithsonian Agreement, member countries anticipated a return flow of dollars to the U.S, but the reduced interest rates within the United States caused dollars to continue to flow out of the U.S. and into foreign central banks. The inflow of dollars into foreign banks continued the monetization of the dollar overseas, defeating the aims of the Smithsonian Agreement. As a result, the dollar price in the gold free market continued to cause pressure on its official rate; soon after a 10% devaluation was announced in February 1973, Japan and the EEC countries decided to let their currencies float. This proved to be the beginning of the collapse of the Bretton Woods System. The end of Bretton Woods was formally ratified by the Jamaica Accords in 1976. By the early 1980s, all industrialised nations were using floating currencies.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In the wake of the Global financial crisis of 2008, some policymakers, such as Chace and others have called for a new international monetary system that some of them also dub "Bretton Woods II". On the other side, this crisis has revived the debate about Bretton Woods II.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: On 26 September 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, "we must rethink the financial system from scratch, as at Bretton Woods."


title: Bretton Woods system

text: In March 2010, Prime Minister Papandreou of Greece wrote an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune, in which he said, "Democratic governments worldwide must establish a new global financial architecture, as bold in its own way as Bretton Woods, as bold as the creation of the European Community and European Monetary Union. And we need it fast." In interviews coinciding with his meeting with President Obama, he indicated that Obama would raise the issue of new regulations for the international financial markets at the next G20 meetings in June and November 2010.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Over the course of the crisis, the IMF progressively relaxed its stance on "free-market" principles such as its guidance against using capital controls. In 2011, the IMF's managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn stated that boosting employment and equity "must be placed at the heart" of the IMF's policy agenda. The World Bank indicated a switch towards greater emphases on job creation.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Following the 2020 Economic Recession, the managing director of the IMF announced the emergence of "A New Bretton Woods Moment" which outlines the need for coordinated fiscal response on the part of central banks around the world to address the ongoing economic crisis.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Dates are those when the rate was introduced; "*" indicates "floating rate" mostly taken prior to the introduction of the euro on 1 January 1999.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Note: Converted to euro on 1 January 1999 at €1 = FRF 6.55957. Values prior to the currency reform of 1 January 1960 are shown in new francs or FRF worth 100 old francs.


title: Bretton Woods system

text: Note: Converted to euro on 1 January 2000 at €1 = FIM 5.94573. Prior to currency reform of 1 January 1963 values shown in new markkaa or FIM worth 100 old markkaa.


title: Tyra Banks

text: Tyra Lynne Banks (born December 4, 1973), also known as BanX, is an American television personality, model, producer, writer, and actress. Born in Inglewood, California, she began her career as a model at the age of 15, and was the first African-American woman to be featured on the covers of "GQ" and the "Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue", on which she appeared three times. She was a Victoria's Secret Angel from 1997 to 2005. By the early 2000s, Banks was one of the world's top-earning models.


title: Tyra Banks

text: Banks began acting on television in the sitcom "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" (1993), and made her film debut in the drama "Higher Learning" (1995). In 2000, she had major film roles, such as Eve in Disney Channel's "Life-Size" and Zoe in the box-office hit "Coyote Ugly." Banks had small roles in the romantic sports film "Love & Basketball" (2000), the horror film "" (2002), and in the television series "Gossip Girl" (2009) and "Glee" (2013).


title: Tyra Banks

text: In 2003, Banks created the long-running reality television series "America's Next Top Model", which she executive produced and presented for the first twenty-two seasons, until the series' cancellation in October 2015. She remained executive producer for the revival of the series in 2016 and enlisted Rita Ora as host for the twenty-third cycle before reassuming the duties herself for the twenty-fourth cycle. Banks was the co-creator of "True Beauty" (2009–2010), and had her own television talk show, "The Tyra Banks Show" (2005–2010), which aired on The CW and won two Daytime Emmy awards for Outstanding Talk Show Informative. In 2015, she co-hosted the talk show "FABLife" for two months. In 2017, Banks was the host of "America's Got Talent" for its 12th season. In 2020, she was the host of "Dancing with the Stars" for its 29th season, also serving as an executive producer.


title: Tyra Banks

text: In 2010, Banks published a young adult novel titled "Modelland", based on her life as a model, which topped "The New York Times" Best Seller list in 2011. She also has her own production company, Bankable Productions, which produced "The Tyra Banks Show", "America's Next Top Model", and the 2008 film "The Clique". Banks is one of four African Americans and seven women to have repeatedly been ranked among the world's most influential people by "Time" magazine. She is also one of only seventeen models to be ranked as a Legendary Supermodel by MODELS.com.


title: Tyra Banks

text: Tyra Lynne Banks was born in Inglewood, California, on December 4, 1973. Her mother, Carolyn London (now London-Johnson), is a medical photographer, and her father, Donald Banks, is a computer consultant. She has a brother, Devin, who is five years older. In 1979, when Banks was six years old, her parents divorced. Banks attended John Burroughs Middle School, and graduated in 1991 from Immaculate Heart High School in Los Angeles. Banks has said that while growing up, she was teased for her appearance and considered an "ugly duckling"; when Banks was 11 years old, she grew three inches and lost 30 pounds in three months. On "America's Next Top Model", Banks discussed the results of an Ancestry.com genealogical DNA test that gave her "79% African, 14% British, and 6% Native American" results. In an interview, she added that she is also "1% Finnish", saying: "I'm 14% British, 6% Native American, 1% Finnish, and all the rest African."


title: Tyra Banks

text: In February 2012, Banks completed a nine-week course at Harvard University's Owner/President Management non-degree extension program.


title: Tyra Banks

text: When Banks was 15 years old, she started modeling while attending school in Los Angeles. She was rejected by four modeling agencies before she was signed by L.A. Models. She switched to Elite Model Management at age 16. When she got the opportunity to model in Europe, she moved to Milan. In her first runway season, she booked 25 shows in the 1991 Paris Fashion Week. Banks appeared in editorials for American, Italian, French, and Spanish "Vogue"; American, French, German, and Spanish "Elle"; American, German, and Malaysian "Harper's Bazaar"; "V"; "W" and Vanity Fair.


title: Tyra Banks

text: She appeared on the covers of magazines such as "Elle"; "Harper's Bazaar"; Spanish "Vogue"; "Cosmopolitan"; "Seventeen" and "Teen Vogue". She walked in fashion shows for Chanel, Oscar de la Renta, Yves Saint Laurent, Anna Sui, Christian Dior, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis, Marc Jacobs, Givenchy, Herve Leger, Valentino, Fendi, Isaac Mizrahi, Giorgio Armani, Sonia Rykiel, Michael Kors and others. She appeared in advertising campaigns for Yves Saint Laurent, Dolce & Gabbana, Escada, Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, Halston, H&M, XOXO, Swatch, Versace, Christian Lacroix, Victoria's Secret, Got Milk?, Pepsi and Nike. In 1993, Banks signed a contract with CoverGirl cosmetics, launching advertising campaigns for the cosmetics company. She was one of only a few Black models to achieve Supermodel status. In the mid-1990s, Banks returned to America to do more commercial modeling.


title: Tyra Banks

text: Banks was the first Black woman on the cover of "Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue" and the first African-American woman on the cover of "GQ". In 1997, she received the VH1 award for "Supermodel of the Year". That year, she was the first African American chosen for the cover of the Victoria's Secret catalog, and became a Victoria's Secret Angel. In 2010, Banks re-signed with her former modeling agency IMG Models. Banks is now a contributor of the "Vogue Italia" website. In 2013, Banks transformed herself into 15 supermodels, in collaboration with fashion photographer Udo Spreitzenbarth.


title: Tyra Banks

text: In 2019, Banks came out of her modeling retirement to pose for one of the three 2019 "Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue" covers; the other cover models being Camille Kostek and Alex Morgan. It marked her third cover for the publication, 22 years after her first. She also announced that she will now go by the modeling name BanX.


title: Tyra Banks

text: Banks's television career began on the fourth season of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air", in which she played lead character Will Smith's old friend Jackie Ames. She made seven appearances in the series. Other TV credits include "Felicity", "All That", "MADtv", "Nick Cannon's Wild 'n Out" (in which she was featured as a special guest host and team captain) and "The Price Is Right" (guest-starring as a "Barker's Beauty"). She also appeared as a guest in the animated talk show "Space Ghost Coast to Coast" in an episode entitled "Chinatown".


title: Tyra Banks

text: Banks started her production company, "Ty Ty Baby Productions" — soon afterward changed to "Bankable Productions" — which produced "The Tyra Banks Show", "America's Next Top Model" and the 2008 movie "The Clique".


title: Tyra Banks

text: Banks is the executive producer and former presenter and judge of "America's Next Top Model". In addition, she hosted "The Tyra Banks Show", a daytime talk show aimed at younger women, which premiered on September 12, 2005, and ran until May 28, 2010.


title: Tyra Banks

text: In 2008, Banks won the Daytime Emmy Award for her work and production on "The Tyra Banks Show", and won for the second time in a row for outstanding, informative talkshow in 2009.


title: Tyra Banks

text: Banks's first big screen role came in 1994, when she co-starred in the drama "Higher Learning". She then co-starred with Lindsay Lohan in the Disney film "Life-Size", playing a doll named Eve who comes to life. Other films she has starred in include "Love Stinks" (1999), "Love & Basketball" (2000), "Coyote Ugly" (2000), "" (2002) and "" (2009).


title: Tyra Banks

text: Banks appeared in the fourth episode of the third season of "Gossip Girl" playing Ursula Nyquist, a larger-than-life actress. She also appeared on the Disney Channel show "Shake It Up" as a school librarian.


title: Tyra Banks

text: In 2012, "Deadline Hollywood" reported that Banks would co-create and produce an ABC comedy series based on her teenage years titled "Fivehead." In 2015, Banks starred in the round table lineup talk show "FABLife" alongside model Chrissy Teigen, fashion stylist Joe Zee, interior designer Lauren Makk, and YouTube personality Leah Ashley. Banks quit the series after less than three months to focus on her cosmetics company. In 2018, Banks returned to acting for her starring role in "Life-Size 2", which premiered on Freeform on December 2. Banks will also star and executive produce "Beauty", a documentary series for Quibi. In 2018, she signed a deal with Universal Television.


title: Tyra Banks

text: In July 2020, it was announced that Banks would be the new host of "Dancing with the Stars". In August 2020, Banks signed a deal with ABC Signature.


title: Tyra Banks

text: In 2014, Banks founded the cosmetics brand Tyra Beauty, which she completed a non-degree certificate program at Harvard Business School specifically for. Tyra Beauty uses a multi-level marketing system to recruit sales distributors, who are called "beautytainers" by the company. Banks held a casting call to find faces for her line, eventually selecting Melody Parra, Monique Hayward, Katy Harvey and "Top Model Norge" contestant Marita Gomsrud as the cosmetic line's original beauty models.


title: Tyra Banks

text: In March 2011, Banks launched her fashion and beauty website called "typeF.com", which she co-created with Demand Media. In 2015, she launched "tyra.com", an interactive cosmetic e-commerce site.


title: Tyra Banks

text: Banks has appeared in several music videos, including Michael Jackson's "Black or White", Mobb Deep's "Trife Life", Tina Turner's "Love Thing", George Michael's "Too Funky" (with models Linda Evangelista, Estelle Lefébure, Emma Sjoberg and Nadja Auermann) and Lionel Richie's "Don't Wanna Lose You". In 2004, she recorded her first single, "Shake Ya Body", which had a music video featuring contestants from cycle 2 of "America's Next Top Model". The video premiered on UPN.


title: Tyra Banks

text: Banks released a single with NBA player Kobe Bryant, entitled "K.O.B.E.", which was performed on NBA TV. She also had a single on the "Life-Size" (2000) soundtrack called "Be a Star". Banks recorded a song with musician Todrick Hall for his 2021 album "Femuline", entitled "Fashón".


title: Tyra Banks

text: In 1998, Banks co-authored a book entitled "Tyra's Beauty, Inside and Out". She announced in May 2010 that she would be writing a novel, titled "Modelland", loosely based on her own modelling experience. It was published in September 2011, intended to be the first of a planned three-part series; "Modelland" topped "The New York Times" Best Seller list in October 2011. In 2018, Banks and her mother, Carolyn London, co-authored a book entitled "Perfect is Boring".


title: Tyra Banks

text: In August 2016, Banks accepted a position as a personal branding guest lecturer at Stanford University.


title: Tyra Banks

text: Banks dated Norwegian photographer Erik Asla during the 2010s, and in January 2016 they had a biological son born via surrogacy. Banks has stated that she tends to avoid drinking and has never used other recreational drugs.


title: Tyra Banks

text: Banks has spoken out about abusive relationships in her past. In 2005, when asked about her relationship history, she stated, "I won't be using a lot of names on the show, but a specific relationship had not just cheating but emotional abuse. It was really bad, but that made me strong." In 2009, she opened up about her past relationships when she made a guest appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," hosting alongside Oprah Winfrey. The episode was dedicated to dating violence in response to the assault of Rihanna by Chris Brown.


title: Tyra Banks

text: In 2011, Banks enrolled in the nine-week Owner/President Management Program (OPM) at Harvard Business School. Banks completed the executive education training program in February 2012, earning a certificate. She has come under criticism for implying she is a Harvard graduate. Jenna Sauers, writing for "Jezebel", referred to her statements on Harvard as "disingenuous", and called upon her to "stop lying" about Harvard. As of 2012, Harvard professor Rohit Deshpande was preparing a case study on Banks's company, Bankable Productions, for use in future coursework in the OPM program.


title: Tyra Banks

text: Banks established the TZONE program, which aimed at leadership and life skills development. She has also established the Tyra Banks Scholarship, a fund aimed at providing African-American girls the opportunity to attend her alma mater, Immaculate Heart High School. In 2005, TZONE transformed from a camp into a public charity, the Tyra Banks TZONE.


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: Per Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (born 17 October 1984), alias anakata, is a Swedish computer specialist, known as the former co-owner of the web hosting company PRQ and co-founder of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay together with Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde.


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: Parts of an interview with Svartholm commenting on the May 2006 police raid of The Pirate Bay are featured in "Good Copy Bad Copy" and "Steal This Film". He is a main focus of the documentary "TPB AFK".


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: In May 2013, WikiLeaks said Svartholm Warg had worked with the organization for the 2010 release of "Collateral Murder", the helicopter cockpit gunsight video of a July 2007 airstrike by U.S. forces in Baghdad. According to WikiLeaks, Svartholm served as technical consultant and managed infrastructure critical to the organization. He was also listed as part of the “decryption and transmission team” and credited for “networking.” Svartholm was one of several Pirate Bay associates who did work for other Wikileaks endeavors. One of Svartholm's companies had previously hosted WikiLeaks' computers.


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: On 27 November 2013, he was extradited to Denmark, where he was charged with infiltrating the Danish social security database, driver's licence database, and the shared IT system used in the Schengen zone. Awaiting his court trial, he was being held in solitary confinement. A court trial ended on 31 October 2014, and he was found guilty by the jury and sentenced to three and a half years in prison. The sentence was appealed immediately, but the judges, fearing that he might try to evade his sentence, ordered that he be held in confinement until the appeal court trial date.


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: After spending three years in different prisons from Sweden and Denmark, he was eventually released on 29 September 2015 and is back to working in IT.


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: Svartholm Warg co-founded Pirate Bay in 2003. It was part of the Swedish anticopyright group and think tank called Piratbyrån (Bureau of Piracy) and became a platform for sharing audio, video, software, and electronic games. According to Svartholm, Piratbyrån was involved with the political operations, focusing on rallies, petitions, and lobbying, among others while Pirate bay's goal is to "help people exchange information".


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: Svartholm also created the tracker software Hypercube (open source software under no specific license) which was used to run The Pirate Bay web site and tracker.


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: The Swedish police first raided Pirate Bay on 31 May 2006 on suspicion that it operates a business infringement copyright. It confiscated servers and questioned its administrators including Svartholm. On 31 January 2008, The Pirate Bay operators – Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström (CEO of The Pirate Bay's former ISP) – were charged with "promoting other people’s infringements of copyright laws". The trial began on 16 February 2009. Svartholm, along with Neij and Lundström, defended Piratebay by arguing that they did not profit from piracy since users were not charged for its services and merely relied on website advertising as the source of revenue. On 17 April 2009, Sunde and his co-defendants were found to be guilty of "assisting in making copyright content available" in the Stockholm District Court. Each defendant was sentenced to one year in prison and they were ordered to pay damages of 30 million SEK (approximately €3,390,317 or US$4,222,980), to be apportioned among the four defendants. The defendants lawyers have appealed to the Svea Court of Appeal together with a request for a retrial in the district court because of the recent suspicion of bias by judge Tomas Norström. Under Swedish law, the verdict is not lawful until all appeals have been processed.


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: In April 2009, Svartholm was the subject of an investigation by Swedish prosecutors looking into his role in The Student Bay, a file sharing site specializing in academic texts. Svartholm claimed he had no knowledge of the site. The site was reported by the Swedish Association for Educational Writers in December 2008 claiming it violated copyright law.


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: In October 2009, Stockholm District Court ordered that Svartholm be banned from operating the Pirate Bay, despite the facts that he was no longer living in Sweden, and the Pirate Bay was no longer located there.


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: On 30 August 2012, at the request of Swedish authorities, Svartholm was arrested by Cambodian police in the capital Phnom Penh, where he had been living for several years. Cambodia has no extradition treaty with Sweden, but Cambodian police spokesman Kirth Chantharith told the AFP news agency "we'll look into our laws and see how we can handle this case". Subsequently, Cambodian police were reported stating that the Swedish government had requested that Gottfrid be deported in connection with "a crime related to information technology".


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: Torrentfreak speculated that Svartholm's arrest may have been connected to a 400 million kronor (at the time, approximately US$59M) two-year "democratic development, human rights, education, and climate change" grant from the Swedish government to the Cambodian government. The grant was announced on 5 September 2012.


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: Gottfrid has since been deported back to Sweden where he served his jail term in the Mariefred prison in Mariefred. He has also been investigated for two alleged instances of hacking, including breaking into the Swedish tax office between 2010 and April 2012, and is also suspected of serious fraud. , no charges had been filed for these matters yet.


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: As of early June 2013 Warg was named as a suspect in a Danish case, where millions of personal identification numbers were stolen from a police database. Danish police have asked that Warg be extradited from Sweden, so that he can be tried in Denmark. It was later confirmed that Svartholm would be extradited to Denmark, to undergo a similar trial to Sweden, the timing of which is dependent on the outcome in Sweden. On 20 June 2013, Gottfrid was found guilty of hacking and sentenced to two years in prison. This two-year prison sentence was eventually reduced to one year by appeal. In November 2013, Gottfrid was deported to Denmark and on 31 October 2014 was subsequently sentenced to three and a half years in prison for breaking into computers owned by CSC.


title: Gottfrid Svartholm

text: Svartholm Warg started the website "Americas Dumbest Soldiers" which listed deceased US soldiers in the Iraq War and asked users of the site to rate how "dumb" the soldiers were based on how they died. Fredrik Neij provided Svartholm Warg's site Internet access via British Telecom. According to Neij, someone at the US State Department contacted the head of British Telecom, who in turn contacted the head of the Swedish provider which Neij worked for, which in turn asked Svartholm Warg and Neij to remove the site. Invoking freedom of speech and parody, Svartholm Warg and Neij questioned the request, but eventually removed the site.


title: Thessaloniki

text: Thessaloniki (; , , also known as Thessalonica (), Saloniki, or Salonica (), is the second-largest city in Greece, with over one million inhabitants in its metropolitan area, and the capital of the geographic region of Macedonia, the administrative region of Central Macedonia and the Decentralized Administration of Macedonia and Thrace. It is also known in Greek as (), literally "the co-capital", a reference to its historical status as the () or "co-reigning" city of the Byzantine Empire alongside Constantinople.


title: Thessaloniki

text: Thessaloniki is located on the Thermaic Gulf, at the northwest corner of the Aegean Sea. It is bounded on the west by the delta of the Axios. The municipality of Thessaloniki, the historical center, had a population of 317,778 in 2021, while the Thessaloniki metropolitan area had 1,091,424 inhabitants in 2021. It is Greece's second major economic, industrial, commercial and political centre, and a major transportation hub for Greece and southeastern Europe, notably through the Port of Thessaloniki. The city is renowned for its festivals, events and vibrant cultural life in general, and is considered to be Greece's cultural capital. Events such as the Thessaloniki International Fair and the Thessaloniki International Film Festival are held annually, while the city also hosts the largest bi-annual meeting of the Greek diaspora. Thessaloniki was the 2014 European Youth Capital.


title: Thessaloniki

text: The city was founded in 315 BC by Cassander of Macedon, who named it after his wife Thessalonike, daughter of Philip II of Macedon and sister of Alexander the Great. An important metropolis by the Roman period, Thessaloniki was the second largest and wealthiest city of the Byzantine Empire. It was conquered by the Ottomans in 1430 and remained an important seaport and multi-ethnic metropolis during the nearly five centuries of Turkish rule. It passed from the Ottoman Empire to the Kingdom of Greece on 8 November 1912. Thessaloniki exhibits Byzantine architecture, including numerous Paleochristian and Byzantine monuments, a World Heritage Site, as well as several Roman, Ottoman and Sephardic Jewish structures. The city's main university, Aristotle University, is the largest in Greece and the Balkans.


title: Thessaloniki

text: Thessaloniki is a popular tourist destination in Greece. In 2013, "National Geographic Magazine" included Thessaloniki in its top tourist destinations worldwide, while in 2014 "Financial Times" FDI magazine (Foreign Direct Investments) declared Thessaloniki as the best mid-sized European city of the future for human capital and lifestyle.<ref name="European Cities and Regions of the Future 2014/15"></ref>


title: Thessaloniki

text: The original name of the city was . It was named after the princess Thessalonike of Macedon, the half sister of Alexander the Great, whose name means "Thessalian victory", from Thessalos, and 'victory' (Nike), honoring the Macedonian victory at the Battle of Crocus Field (353/352 BC).


title: Thessaloniki

text: The name is first attested in Greek in the Chronicle of the Morea (14th century), and is common in folk songs, but it must have originated earlier, as al-Idrisi called it "Salunik" already in the 12th century. It is the basis for the city's name in other languages: ("Solunŭ") in Old Church Slavonic, () in Judeo-Spanish, () in Hebrew, ("Selenik") in Albanian language, ("Selânik") in Ottoman Turkish and in modern Turkish, in Italian, "Solun" or in the local and neighboring South Slavic languages, ("Saloníki") in Russian, and "Sãrunã" in Aromanian.


title: Thessaloniki

text: In English, the city can be called Thessaloniki, Salonika, Thessalonica, Salonica, Thessalonika, Saloniki, Thessalonike, or Thessalonice. In printed texts, the most common name and spelling until the early 20th century was Thessalonica; through most of rest of the 20th century, it was Salonika. By about 1985, the most common single name became Thessaloniki. The forms with the Latin ending "-a" taken together remain more common than those with the phonetic Greek ending "-i" and much more common than the ancient transliteration "-e".


title: Thessaloniki

text: Thessaloniki was revived as the city's official name in 1912, when it joined the Kingdom of Greece during the Balkan Wars. In local speech, the city's name is typically pronounced with a dark and deep "L", characteristic of the accent of the modern Macedonian dialect of Greek. The name is often abbreviated as .


title: Thessaloniki

text: The city was founded around 315 BC by the King Cassander of Macedon, on or near the site of the ancient town of Therma and 26 other local villages. He named it after his wife Thessalonike, a half-sister of Alexander the Great and princess of Macedonia as daughter of Philip II. Under the kingdom of Macedonia the city retained its own autonomy and parliament and evolved to become the most important city in Macedonia.


title: Thessaloniki

text: Twenty years after the fall of the Kingdom of Macedonia in 168 BC, in 148 BC, Thessalonica was made the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia. Thessalonica became a free city of the Roman Republic under Mark Antony in 41 BC. It grew to be an important trade hub located on the "Via Egnatia", the road connecting Dyrrhachium with Byzantium, which facilitated trade between Thessaloniki and great centers of commerce such as Rome and Byzantium. Thessaloniki also lays at the southern end of the main north–south route through the Balkans along the valleys of the Morava and Axios river valleys, thereby linking the Balkans with the rest of Greece. The city became the capital of one of the four Roman districts of Macedonia;.


title: Thessaloniki

text: At the time of the Roman Empire, about 50 AD, Thessaloniki was also one of the early centers of Christianity; while on his second missionary journey, Paul the Apostle visited this city's chief synagogue on three Sabbaths and sowed the seeds for Thessaloniki's first Christian church. Later, Paul wrote letters to the new church at Thessaloniki, with two letters to the church under his name appearing in the Biblical canon as First and Second Thessalonians. Some scholars hold that the First Epistle to the Thessalonians is the first written book of the New Testament.


title: Thessaloniki

text: In 306 AD, Thessaloniki acquired a patron saint, St. Demetrius, a Christian whom Galerius is said to have put to death. Most scholars agree with Hippolyte Delehaye's theory that Demetrius was not a Thessaloniki native, but his veneration was transferred to Thessaloniki when it replaced Sirmium as the main military base in the Balkans. A basilical church dedicated to St. Demetrius, Hagios Demetrios, was first built in the fifth century AD and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.


title: Thessaloniki

text: When the Roman Empire was divided into the tetrarchy, Thessaloniki became the administrative capital of one of the four portions of the Empire under Galerius Maximianus Caesar, where Galerius commissioned an imperial palace, a new hippodrome, a triumphal arch and a mausoleum, among other structures.


title: Thessaloniki

text: In 379, when the Roman Prefecture of Illyricum was divided between the East and West Roman Empires, Thessaloniki became the capital of the new Prefecture of Illyricum. The following year, the Edict of Thessalonica made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. In 390, Gothic troops under the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, led a massacre against the inhabitants of Thessalonica, who had risen in revolt against the Gothic soldiers. By the time of the Fall of Rome in 476, Thessaloniki was the second-largest city of the Eastern Roman Empire.


title: Thessaloniki

text: From the first years of the Byzantine Empire, Thessaloniki was considered the second city in the Empire after Constantinople, both in terms of wealth and size. with a population of 150,000 in the mid-12th century. The city held this status until its transfer to Venetian control in 1423. In the 14th century, the city's population exceeded 100,000 to 150,000, making it larger than London at the time.