Edward M. Bernstein

Nationality

U.S.A.

Date of Birth

1905

Date of Death

1996

Political
Preference

Edward M. Bernstein was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, and studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, and received a doctorate in economics from Harvard in 1931. He went on to be a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina. Bernstein was a prominent economist who had been a consultant to U.S. presidents, foreign governments and central banks and who had served as the first research director of the International Monetary Fund.

Bernstein, a former university professor, came to Washington in 1940 and joined the Treasury Department, where he was an adviser and researcher and became the equivalent of the department’s chief economist.

At the historic Bretton Woods conference in 1944, which established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, he served as chief treasury technical adviser and staff chief with the U.S. delegation and became a driving force behind the conference. One of Bernstein’s feats was convincing the British economist and monetary expert John Maynard Keynes, who led the British delegation to Bretton Woods, that there would not be a grave depression in the United States after World War II. From the mid-1940s to 1958, Bernstein served as the fund’s first research director. In that post, he closely worked with Robert Triffin, a Belgian-American economist. Together, they made several studies of the post-war economic situation in Europe. In this regard, it was especially Triffin who argued for regional monetary clearing between European countries – which was at odds with the global focus on exchange rate convertibility by the IMF.