Allied troops had only just stormed the Normandy beaches when delegates to the first United Nations monetary and economic conference gathered in July 1944 at the Mount Washington hotel in New Hampshire resort of Bretton Woods. A durable post-war system was uppermost in their minds and those of John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White of the U.S. Treasury, but of course the institutions and arrangements they agreed on were rooted in the lessons of the Great Depression. The Bretton Woods architects knew they had to combine regulations that applied to the domestic affairs of the 44 participating countries with rules covering international relations. For the United States, which served as an example to be emulated, the logic of the Glass Steagall Act of 1933 which President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Dealers had used to separate investment from commercial banking and the management of aggregate demand applied to domestic finance, while pegged but adjustable exchange rates and capital controls were used as part of the post-war strategy for enhancing global economic recovery and trade. What economists call the “impossible trinity” of stable exchange rates, the free flow of capital and an independent monetary policy was taken care of through those arrangements. Once the “Nixon Shock” de-linked the dollar from gold in the early 1970s, a dynamic was set in motion that gathered tremendous speed via waves of financial deregulation. The “Big Bang” in the City of London in 1986, Glass Steagall’s repeal in 1999 and in 2000 the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in the U.S. all ushered in a new era of rapid growth of finance in the industrialised world, and fuelled the EU’s deeper financial integration. But the darker sides of the new financial system were poorly understood, and were largely dismissed because of a growing belief in market self-regulation and the virtues of