Letters to Monetary Trouble Foreseen Clarification of Bretton Woods Plan Regarded as Essential To THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES: In a letter to THE TIMES published March 4 I asked a few questions about the meaning and purpose of the pro- posals in the Bretton Woods agreement which relate to the establishment of an international monetary fund. If they are, in fact, unanswerable, the fund will not only prove to be an un- workable proposition but is bound to lead to serious misunderstanding be- tween the United States and Great Britain. The divergence of view between the two countries is already wide. You have been led to believe that the Bret- ton Woods proposals take us all back along the road to a gold standard, cur- rency stability, non-discrimination and multilateral trade. We have been as- sured that they constitute the exact reverse of a gold standard, that ex- change rates will be flexible and that reciprocal trade agreements involving discrimination will be permissible. There is the additional point, which I made in my letter, that the provisions of the agreement as at present drafted would apparently permit of a colossal black currency market in New York, at rates which would be illegal in other centers. A most disquieting feature of the present situation is that if the agree- ment is now ratified without any clari- fication of these and other issues, it may well delay, or even preclude, any attempt at a radical solution of the British economic problem after the war in collaboration with the United States. Many of us, on both sides of the At- lantic, believe that this is an essential condition of ultimate world prosperity. The arguments now being advanced in favor of immediate ratification of the Bretton Woods proposals as they stand are (1) that as they were agreed upon by "experts" of forty-four na- tions, they must be perfect and there- fore sacrosanct; (2) that the fund and the bank are inseparable; and (3) that rejection or modification of the pro- posals would jeopardize the prospects of international cooperation in the po- litical field. None of these arguments seems to me to be valid. Experts-and particularly economic experts-have seldom been right in the past. As the late Lord Birkenhead once observed: "They grope more faithfully, but with less certainty, to- ward the light (or toward the dark) than the titular exponents of any.other branch of human learning." Moreover, we have been repeatedly told that the experts at Bretton Woods had no au- thority to commit their Governments. An international bank for recon- struction and the development of back- ward countries could start to function immediately. But no monetary plan by itself can restore equilibrium or pros- perity to a shattered world. Monetary stability can only be achieved on the basis of a durable peace settlement, in- ternal political stability and common part political economic participating objectives countries. the and on of the There is therefore much force in the argument that the objects of San Fran- cisco take precedence over, and are in- deed a necessary prelude to, those of Bretton Woods. Is it too much to ask that, at this late hour, we should stop trying to lead each other up the garden path, and face honestly and realistically the difficult problems which admittedly confront us? ROBERT BOOTHBY. New York, March 12, 1945. The writer of the foregoing letter is a Member of Parliament and chairman of the Monetary Policy Committee in London, which includes Members of Parliament of all parties.