Camille Gutt

Nationality

Belgium

Date of Birth

1884

Date of Death

1974

Political
Preference

Camille Gutt was born in Brussels and obtained a master’s degree in political and social sciences and a PhD in legal studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He was a Belgian economist and politician and served several ministerial posts from 1939 until 1944. He was the first Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund from 1946 to 1951.

After his military service during the First World War, Gutt was appointed to work for the Commission of Food Supply in London, where he worked for Georges Theunis. Theunis soon got impressed by Gutt’s intelligence and Theunis decided to make Gutt his closest advisor and a fifty years long friendship was born. When Theunis became Prime Minister in 1921, he appointed Gutt to become his Chief of Staff. In this role, Gutt supervised the difficult negotiations on German reparations. In 1925, Gutt became assistant to the Treasury and negotiated the international monetary stabilizations loan with the Anglo-America bankers.

Camille Gutt was Minister of Finance from 1939 to 1945, Minister of Economic Affairs from 1940 to 1944, and Minister of Defence from 1940 to 1942 with the Belgian government in exile in London. Together with his Dutch Colleague Johannes Vandebroeck he drafted a plan that led to the first Benelux monetary agreement in October 1943. Gutt was convinced that these agreements should not be limited to these three countries and hoped to get the United Kingdom on boards. Due to his good contacts with the leading British and American actors (John Maynard Keynes and Harry D. White) at the United Nations Conference of Bretton Woods in 1944, Gutt was able to get the position as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).