Circa 1945, the belief in automatically equilibrating market forces and the dangers of government controls of capital movements was widely regarded as historically obsolete. Henry Dexter White, leader of the US delegation to the conference, argued characteristically that objections to interference with capital and gold movements were “hangovers from a Nineteenth Century economic creed, which held that international economic adjustments, if left alone, would work themselves out towards an ‘equilibrium’ with a minimum of harm to world trade and prosperity.” In an influential publication from the League of Nations, Ragnar Nurkse explained the dominant professional opinion of the time that “international monetary policy [should] conform to domestic social and economic policy and not the other way round.”

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 417