The End of Bretton Woods?

For those who don't know, at the end of WWII, the British and Americans got together at a place called Bretton Woods and, more or less in a month, put together the post-war economic order. The IMF and World Bank both come from Bretton Woods, and both have had a huge role in directing what is "permissible" for developing countries that want to get wealthy. Until, maybe, now. via China digital times:

SINGAPORE -- African countries are increasingly looking to borrow money from China because the flow of funds from the World Bank and other donors has been slow and contain too many conditions, several African finance ministers said Sunday.

China's economic surge over the past decade has boosted demand for oil and commodity exports from Africa, helping spur growth in some of its major economies like Nigeria and Kenya.

Meanwhile, Beijing is steadily strengthening its economic and political ties with Africa by investing in the continent and offering loans. In June, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited several African nations, signing a string of investment and loan agreements in Egypt, Angola and Ghana.

It must be truly puzzling for American liberals (at least, the Friedman/Krugman economic axis) to see China so successfully undermining American influence around the world. Developing countries are clamoring for an alternative to the Bretton Woods institutions, having had their economies ruined and stagnated for so long by Bretton Woods policies. (It is slightly unfair to lumpy the World Bank pragmatists with the IMF extremists, but only slightly.) China is obviously looking for way to steer it's investments away from the United States, the better to avoid enmeshing itself too deeply in the economy of a potential rival.

For the people who, not too long ago, were telling us how vital the IMF and the World Bank were to global prosperity, this must look awfully confusing. But this is only because those same people spent years dismissing all contrary evidence that the IMF and World Bank were in fact severely harming the global poor. No wonder that Africa is banging down China's door.