Is Germany Repeating American Errors at Bretton Woods? - At the founding of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in 1944, the world's dominant creditor nation, the U.S., set out to revive a fixed exchange-rate system by offering a war-torn, debt-ridden world a new deal in monetary relations, one to be supported by concessionary dollar loans from a new International Monetary Fund. Today, Germany is trying to resuscitate the periphery of the crisis-stricken euro area in much the same way, and it is worth looking back at the formation of Bretton Woods for clues as to how this will play out.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-16/is-germany-repeating-american-errors-at-bretton-woods-.html