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After four years of bickering, Finance Ministers of the IMF's member countries unanimously agreed on the scheme at last September's IMF meeting in Rio de Janeiro. Since then, IMF technicians and the executive board have been hammering out the details and putting them into legal language. For a time, after Yale Economist Robert Triffin in 1959 revived and modernized the old idea of letting the IMF create its own money, the French seemed moderately cooperative. France even came up with one version of a plan to establish the "cru" —for collective reserve unit—to be issued in proportion to each country's supply of gold, only to turn away from it again. French Economist Jacques Rueff, who influenced De Gaulle to advocate a return to the old gold standard, argues that the price of gold should be doubled. Though Rueff's stature at home is sufficient to have made him a member of the exclusive 40-man band of intellectuals, the Academic Francaise, his views find little support among other major powers. However, Rueff has conceded that he "would prefer almost any solution to no solution at all."
A handful of issues over SDRs remain unsettled. The most prominent is a French demand for a clause allowing any country to opt out of further use of SDRs. Because such a proviso would surround the new system with a permanent aura of uncertainty, the French have been unable to win support on that point. But they are still pressing it. In the early bargaining, Schweitzer fought a successful diplomatic offensive to overcome the strong European preference for putting the new facility under the thumb of a small group of rich industrial nations instead of under the globally minded IMF.
Other squabbling has involved whether to call the SDRs "money," as the U.S. wanted, or merely a new source of credit, as some conservative European bankers demanded. Diplomatically, Schweitzer took a neutral stand; the SDKs were "a facility of special character," he said. Governor Otmar Emminger of West Germany's Bundesbank teased both camps: the SDKs are really a zebra, he maintained, "so that one can say they are a black animal with white stripes and another can say they are a white animal with black stripes."
Whatever their quintessence, the SDRs are coming onstage just in time to plug the gap in wherewithal to finance world trade that Lord Keynes foresaw at Bretton Woods. Over the past ten years, world trade has doubled; monetary reserves to finance it have increased by only 40%. In both 1965 and 1966 (the latest full-year figures available), the world's central banks suffered a net loss of gold, despite all the metal that was mined. Besides the pressure from hoarders and speculators, industrial demand for bullion is leaping some 15% a year—notably for sophisticated electronic and space apparatus (even the portholes of Boeing's SST passenger transport will be plated with a thin layer of gold to help dissipate the heat from the skin of the fuselage).