The world economy is in crisis again. If we look back 80 years, we might be able to fix it

‘The presiding intellect of the 1944 Bretton Woods summit was the brilliant British economist John Maynard Keynes (above centre).’ Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

For historians of the postwar economic era, 2024 marks an important anniversary. Eighty years ago, in July 1944, a small town called Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, America, hosted a conference. Its purpose was to establish a new set of rules and institutions that could keep order over global capitalism after the disasters of the Great Depression and the second world war. It is not too much to say that Bretton Woods established the infrastructure of the modern global economy.

Eight decades later, the world is a very different place. But once again the global economy – post-Covid, post-energy price shock, experiencing rapid climate change – is in crisis. Calls for a new Bretton Woods have been growing louder.