HEM Washington D.C. Senior Fellow Emeritus

Henry E. Martyn

Senior Fellow Emeritus. Three decades in multilateral development institutions and federal monetary policy advisory roles. The Cantillon Institute.

Monetary Policy HistoryInstitutional AnalysisBretton Woods LegacyMultilateral Finance

Retired Senior Economist with three decades of institutional experience spanning multilateral development institutions and federal monetary policy advisory roles. Martyn entered public economic life when the Bretton Woods framework was still living institutional memory, and spent his career inside the apparatus watching the gradual displacement of that architecture by privately-mediated financial infrastructure.

His forewords do not editorialise. They locate. He situates the present moment within the longer arc of monetary history with the patience of someone who has seen urgency used as a substitute for analysis too many times to be hurried.

Martyn writes from Washington, D.C.

THE LONG RECORD

No. 1

The Bretton Woods Lesson: What the 1971 Collapse Actually Produced and What the Stablecoin Architecture Is Doing to That Advantage Now

The Nixon shock dissolved the gold peg; it did not dissolve the institutional architecture of dollar hegemony. The stablecoin architecture is performing the same operation on the Federal Reserve intermediation layer. The structural parallel is precise: in both cases, an institutional constraint on dollar issuance is dissolved while dollar denomination is retained and extended. The historical record is unambiguous about what the short-term gain and the long-term structural cost look like when they arrive together.

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CONTRIBUTIONS

Full

The Dollar Displacement Thesis: Foreword

Martyn provides the foreword to the complete working paper series, locating the Dollar Displacement Thesis within the institutional history of monetary architecture and the precedents that make its conclusions legible.

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