WI: International Clearing Union/the Bancor adopted after WWII?

[Ismailov]

International Clearing Union - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Bancor - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I'm running a simulation of the world of 1945, and one of the players brought up the possibility of having the ICU and its supranational currency enacted.

I'm wondering how Alt History users would answer the following:
1. What possibility is there, from a POD of April 1945, of the ICU being adopted by the United States? What would Congress think (I assume quite a few congressmen and senators would oppose it)?
2. If adopted, what are the potential economic benefits and/or consequences during 1945-55?

 

[Hugo Strange]

One of the main issues was that John Maynard Keynes proposed that any country racking up a large trade deficit would have to start paying interest, and would be forced to reduce the value of its currency and to prevent the export of capital. With the American Senate not being interested in letting any outside organization tell them what to do regarding the value of the U.S. dollar (i.e. they weren't going to let the ICU tell them they needed to decrease the value of the dollar), some of the fundamentals of the ICU would need to change for any of this to become acceptable to Congress. In general Congress doesn't let anyone else tell them what to do (no matter of it's about recognizing Taiwan or the PRC as "China", or cutting off relations with apartheid-South Africa, or being forced to do something about climate change), so as long as there was any hint that the ICU could potentially interfere with the value of the dollar, which Congress would see as an unacceptable interference in American internal issues, the USA probably wasn't going to have anything to do with the ICU.

 

[Ismailov]

With the American Senate not being interested in letting any outside organization tell them what to do regarding the value of the U.S. dollar (i.e. they weren't going to let the ICU tell them they needed to decrease the value of the dollar), some of the fundamentals of the ICU would need to change for any of this to become acceptable to Congress.

Yeah, in game there's a proposal that the ICU be part of the World Bank in some way, under the argument that this would make the US Senate more amenable to the idea, but I don't know if that would be enough for it to pass the Senate or if the legislatures of West European countries wouldn't take issue with the ICU being under the World Bank.

 

[AbeLincoln1865]

I'd also be interested to know more about the consequences of this.