It’s come to this, a competition of conferences. In Washington, the capital of the world’s largest capitalist nation, representatives of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were in a celebratory mood last week. It is 80 years since 730 delegates from 44 nations gathered in a rehabilitated hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and succeeded in establishing a world financial order that crowned the dollar king of the currencies — a throne it maintained even after Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the paper dollar into the yellow metal in 1971.
Simultaneously, some 5,000 miles to the east in Kazan, the capital of the Russian republic of Tatarstan, a group of countries were addressing the same issues being discussed in Washington. But rather than
