# Can President Trump Turn Back the Economic Clock?  ## About - Author: Binyamin Appelbaum - Title: Can President Trump Turn Back the Economic Clock? - Published: 2025-05-07 - URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/magazine/trump-economy-finance-history.html ## Highlights **In the summer of** 1944, the United States gathered its allies at a resort called Bretton Woods in the White Mountains of New Hampshire to claim what the State Department described as “the main prize of the victory” in World War II: the power to dictate new rules for the global economy. ... At the retreat, the British economist John Maynard Keynes argued that the new system should include a mechanism for limiting trade imbalances, but the United States rejected that idea. The Roosevelt administration could foresee that after the war, with Europe and Japan in ruins, the United States would enjoy a period of unrivaled economic supremacy. The arsenal of democracy would return to making consumer goods, and the United States did not want to constrain its ability to sell those goods in foreign markets. ---