Andrew Crockett Memorial Lecture
Lecture on the occasion of the Bank's Annual General Meeting, Basel, 29 June 2025.
Abstract
A US-centric, dollar-based international monetary and financial system (IMFS) was inevitable in the immediate postwar decades considering prevailing economic conditions and the institutional arrangements made at Bretton Woods. But while some predicted that the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1973 would bring a more symmetric IMFS, the United States has remained central until now, and the dollar still reigns supreme. The US administration in power since January 2025 is taking a different fork in the road, basing its international policies on the premise that current global trade, financial and geopolitical arrangements have unfairly disadvantaged America. Coupled with domestic institutional erosion within the United States, that approach, if pursued without compromise, would recast the IMFS by fragmenting financial markets and diminishing the dollar's central role.
Maurice Obstfeld is the C Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2015 through 2018, he served as Economic Counsellor and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund. During 2014 and 2015, he was a member of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. He co-authored International Economics: Theory and Policy (with Paul Krugman and Marc Melitz), Foundations of International Macroeconomics (with Kenneth Rogoff) and Global Capital Markets: Integration, Crisis, and Growth (with Alan M Taylor).