O fundo do poder e o poder do fundo: poder monetário estrutural norte-americano e Fundo Monetário Internacional (FMI)

Abstract

This research, inserted in the field of International Political Economy, starts from the concept of structural power (Strange, 1997) and explores one of its dimensions - structural monetary power - of the United States, based on the main changes in the International Monetary and Financial System (SMFI), which in the early 1970s abandoned the dollar-gold standard outlined in Bretton Woods and began to be governed by the flexible dollar standard, with increasing globalization of international finance. At the time of the creation of the International Monetary Fund, the United States had a combination of capabilities from the four facets of structural power that made it powerful. This allowed the power to articulate how the new international monetary and financial system would operate to replace the interwar regime. Considering the different stages experienced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since its creation, as an international organization that functioned as one of the pillars of the monetary system after the second world war, we seek to analyze to what extent the Fund, weakened by the rupture of parity between the dollar and gold and by assuming new functions, it continued to respond to the claim of American structural monetary power. Based on the observation of the international monetary and financial system (SMFI) as a hierarchical and structural system, the work aims to analyze whether the Fund, created as a component part of the American structural power, acted and acts as an instrument of this power in the Monetary System and International Finance.