## Three Days at Camp David: How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy — Jeffrey E. Garten

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**Canonical URL:** [Three Days at Camp David: How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy — Jeffrey E. Garten](https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/september/book-review-three-days-at-camp-david-garten.pdf)

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### Publication and bibliographic details
- HarperCollins, New York, NY, 2021, 448 pp., $23.99
- Review originally published in FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT | September 2021

### Context and trigger
- Bretton Woods commitment: the United States promised to provide gold, on demand, in exchange for dollars accruing in foreign central banks.
- By the late 1960s the United States ran balance of payments deficits and began depleting its gold stock.
- US monetary gold fell to $10 billion against $40 billion in liabilities.
- Trigger event: President Richard Nixon’s decision to close the “gold window” on August 15, 1971.
- The pivotal meeting took place at Camp David over the weekend of August 13–15, 1971.

### Key actors and positions at Camp David
- Richard Nixon: focused primarily on domestic political reaction and reshaped the public narrative about closing the gold window.
- Arthur Burns and Paul Volcker: worried about how foreign officials would react to closing the gold window.
- John Connally: argued closing the gold window would pressure surplus countries into revaluing their currencies.
- George Shultz: influenced by Milton Friedman, favored floating exchange rates to make the issue moot.
- Garten’s account emphasizes how personalities, backgrounds, and preoccupations of these figures influenced outcomes.

### Events, outcomes, and aftermath
- Nixon transformed the dominant narrative from an admission of US policy failure to a triumphant fresh start appealing to domestic audiences.
- The immediate post-Camp David arrangement: the short-lived Smithsonian Agreement.
- Garten chronicles detailed discussions at Camp David that led to the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate system.

### Anecdotes and sensitivities
- Connally pressed the Japanese finance minister to revalue the yen by 17 percent; the minister refused, citing that a 17 percent revaluation in the interwar period had led to the finance minister’s assassination.
- Connally, who had been in the car during President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and had himself been shot, accepted a 16.9 percent revaluation.
- Garten notes that the Japanese prime minister had pre-authorized up to a 20 percent revaluation.

### Assessment and tone
- Garten’s book fills a gap in understanding the specific triggering event for the demise of Bretton Woods by focusing on the Camp David weekend.
- The reviewer characterizes the book as “superb,” “light, but thoroughly enjoyable, reading,” and a useful reminder that people, personalities, and politics shape historical economic outcomes.
- Recommendation for audience: not merely for international economists’ bookshelves, but as bedside reading for insight into the human dimensions of economic history.

*ATISH REX GHOSH, IMF historian*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/september/book-review-three-days-at-camp-david-garten.pdf_