Rejecting both the discipline of the gold standard and the instability of floating exchange rates, the international gathering of policy-makers at Bretton Woods established a monetary system that combined two policy goals: on the one hand, enabling sovereign, autonomous, and democratic economic policies aimed at full employment; and on the other hand, fixed but adjustable exchange rates that were pegged to the US dollar, which in turn had a gold parity (gold exchange standard coupled with IMF assistance). The dominant opinion at Bretton Woods was that strict capital controls were needed to make democratic domestic fiscal and monetary policies compatible with fixed exchange rates, and “almost every analyst” regarded “control of capital movements for unlimited time” as a precondition for the restoration of stable international trade.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 419