(8 of 10)
The U.S. wants a change in the system not only because it fears that a payments equilibrium would retard international trade by drying up dollars, but because the U.S. has been gravely penalized for serving as banker to the world. Most nations get into balance-of-payments problems because they run a trade deficit; the U.S., on the contrary, exports far more than it imports. It has got into its payments difficulty because it pumps out so many dollars in ways that help the rest of the free world: foreign aid, tourism and lending to capital-starved nations. Now the U.S. wants some of the newly rich Continental nations to carry more of the burden of financing world trade.
The Continentals, on the other hand, complain that the U.S. dollar—and, to a lesser extent, the British pound—have too much power in the world economy. Germany, the Benelux countries and several other nations of the Continent do not go along completely with Charles de Gaulle—who has retreated from his earlier bid to restore the gold standard—but they are moved by a rising tide of economic nationalism, want to upgrade the status and powers of their own currencies at the expense of the dollar.
The Continental moneymen also complain that the current system too easily allows acquisitive U.S. companies to buy up European industries and to inflate economies with dollars over which the moneymen have no control. If the U.S. wants to take over more of Europe's companies, they argue, it should be forced to dig more deeply into its gold stock instead of paying off in dollars, which are often not cashed in but float through Europe's banking system in the form of Eurodollars.
New Money. Bankers and economists from the Rhine to the Potomac are chewing over basic reforms of the money system. Separate and secret working groups have been set up by the IMF, the U.S. Treasury, the Common Market and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Lyndon Johnson recently named a blue-ribbon monetary-reform committee that includes former Treasury Secretary Dillon, Bankers David Rockefeller and André Meyer. The monetary debate has brought forth basic plans for reform from such eminent economists as Yale's Robert Triffin and Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson (both of whom propose to turn the IMF into a supercharged world central bank with powers to create its own money), and France's Jacques Rueff (who wants a return to the gold standard but is now almost alone in his stand).
The idea of creating an international money has become one of the most widely discussed ideas for reform. The industrial powers would contribute their own kroner, francs, marks and yen to some kind of international agency that would then print, issue and regulate the new money for use in international trade and finance (it would not be used by citizens of individual countries). Several powerful forces have adopted this idea in various forms. The Common Market is discussing