The Deal That Made the Dollar

In the final year of World War II, as armies fought across Europe and the Pacific, another battle unfolded in secret — a battle to decide who would control the world’s money.

At a luxury hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, delegates from forty-four nations gathered to design a new global financial system. The result would make the U.S. dollar the cornerstone of the modern world — and change the balance of power for generations.

This film tells the full story of that deal: how John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White clashed over the future of money, how the IMF and World Bank were born, and how a single agreement bound the world’s currencies to the dollar and, indirectly, to American gold.

For twenty-five years, that system fueled prosperity — until it cracked in 1971, when Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold. What began as a vision for peace became the foundation of the modern financial order.

The Deal That Made the Dollar is the untold story of how America won the economic war — not with weapons, but with promises.