18 november 2020
Publication

Le moment "Bretton Woods" à l'ère du COVID-19 et la coopération mondiale entre les banques centrales

Camila Villard Duran, résidente IEA-Nantes 2020/2021 nous propose son dernier article paru dans la revue de l'institut d'études avancées de l'Université de Sao Paulo. Voici l'abstract en anglais et l'article en portugais.

The Bretton Woods moment in the Era of COVID-19 and the global cooperation between central banks

The Covid-19 crisis reinforced and consolidated a template for global monetary cooperation, aiming to keep the international financial markets functioning. At the core of the monetary system, the legal design for cooperation has changed substantially: from the central role of multilateral organizations responsible for organizing collective actions (such as the International Monetary Fund - IMF), to more flexible contractual arrangements, formalized by a network of Central Bank swaps. The management of the Covid-19 monetary impacts reveals a new Bretton Woods moment, organized in novel political and legal terms. This article argues that Law has an explanatory and constitutive role in this substantial development. The US dollar, as a global currency, is structured by a specific type of contract, the eurodollar. In times of crisis, this contract requires an international lender of last resort that provides unlimited financial support to the currency’s global uses. Only a financial institution organized as a central bank has the legal and economic capacity to perform this role - not a multilateral fund. The hierarchical network of Central Bank swaps, with the American Central Bank (the Federal Reserve - Fed) at the top, was the legal arrangement structured to support the functioning of the global financial market and its currency par excellence, the eurodollar.

Camila Villard Duran est une chercheuse franco-brésilienne travaillant sur des questions liées à la sociologie du droit économique et à l’économie politique du droit. Depuis 2013, elle est maître de conférences à l’Université de São Paulo (USP, Brésil). Actuellement, elle est associée au Global Economic Governance Programme (GEG) de l’Université d’Oxford. Elle a été chercheuse attachée à l’Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellowship Programme de l’Université de Princeton (Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs) et l’Université d’Oxford (2014-2016).