ABSTRACT
Over the course of about 150 years the architecture of international monetary and fi nancial governance has become quite complex and crowded. It was not until 1930 that the fi rst offi cial international fi nancial institution was created: the Bank for International Settlements. The Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 complemented the groundwork for today’s architecture. In the following decades it underwent a fascinating evolution, marked by both path dependency and discontinuity, in response to changes in the external environment. Three basic logics can be distinguished that propelled the architecture’s permanent expansion, deepening and reform. They can respectively be termed functional, geopolitical and managerial.
