His ideas for monetary reform, based on the creation of a new currency which he called bancor, would have reduced the importance of the dollar (and of gold) and given Britain a shared influence with the US in managing the world monetary system. "Keynes' advice", in the words of another great economist Joseph Schumpeter, "was in the first instance always English advice, born of English problems." The Keynes plan was doomed to fail because it was up against the brick wall of American economic power.

Would Keynes have made more progress if he had been less rude to the Americans? For some members of Congress, Keynes was nothing more than a slick-tongued aristocratic bamboozler, and his arrogance did little to win friends on the other side. At Bretton Woods Keynes once threw a draft written by Harry White to the floor and prepared to walk out, to which White replied: "we will try to produce something which Your Highness can understand."

Yet Keynes was also a realist, recognising with total clarity the weakness of the British position and the need to make concessions which, however unpalatable to his political masters in London, would give Britain at least some room for manoeuvre in a US-dominated world. As Steil remarks, the Bretton Woods saga took place at a crossroads in modern history. An ascendant anti-colonial superpower used its economic leverage over a once-dominant but now insolvent imperial ally to rewrite the rules of international finance.