Tom de Vries

"All is well that ends," Treasury Secretary William Simon said jokingly at the cocktail party that followed the conclusion of the recent Jamaica Conference. It would indeed be hard to give in a few syllables a more discerning judgment about the long drawn-out international monetary negotiations of the past four to five years, since the suspension of the convertibility of the dollar into gold in August 1971, and the resulting collapse of the system of par values or fixed exchange rates which had existed since 1944.