When a new international economic order for the postwar period was crafted at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, the agreement was based on a widely held consensus that rejected both the gold standard and free-floating exchange rates in favor of a prioritization of domestic policy goals—most importantly full employment—and the need for widespread capital controls. The mainstream rejection of the two options discussed by the neoliberals demonstrates how far their views were from the economic consensus in the mid-twentieth century and is thus worth explaining at some length.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 416