The Mount Washington Resort at Bretton Woods sits amid remote mountains in New Hampshire, an implausibly rustic spot in which to start a world economy.

"In Bretton Woods I'm guessing you'll bump into as many bears as you do people," said Jeffrey S. Coons, co-director of research for the investment firm of Manning & Napier in Rochester, N.Y. "I would certainly spend more time in Pittsburgh from a business perspective."

The road from Bretton Woods to Pittsburgh took a 65-year-long journey born in war and grounded in the belief that wealth traveling freely would invariably arrive at peace and prosperity.

It was Bretton Woods that marked the system of global economic planning that created the world economy and the summits that go with it.

"It really was an important foundation to the economic coordination we have today," said Mr. Coons, who joined a dozen other experts last month for a commemorative discussion on the 1944 "United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference" held at the New Hampshire resort.

If Bretton Woods was the start, it was a cautious one, born of compromise first and foremost over how to keep the world's currencies from fluctuating so wildly that their sponsoring governments were destabilized.

Pittsburgher Malcolm Cowley, a literary critic and poet, wrote of the phenomenon between the world wars in his memoir, "Exile's Return."

It happened that old Europe, the continent of immemorial standards, had lost them all: it had only prices, which changed from country to country, from village to village, it seemed, from hour to hour. Tuesday in Hamburg you might order a banquet for eight cents (or was it five?); Thursday in Paris you might buy 20 cigarettes for the price of a week's lodging in Vienna.

"You had European countries engaging in competitive devaluations in order to increase their market share. It contributed heavily to the Depression," said George C. Lodge, a retired professor at the Harvard Business School.

Mr. Lodge was 11 years old when statesmen gathered at Bretton Woods.

With them came John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who pioneered the theory of market controls and shifts in spending to stimulate moribund economies. With him was Henry Dexter White, a senior Treasury official.

Both men looked for a way to keep currencies from repeating the meaningless journey Cowley described 10 years earlier. Mr. Keynes proposed a universal currency called the Bancor and wanted all other currencies connected directly to the value of gold.

White thought the idea daft. A currency, he argued, needed a national central bank behind it or nobody would take it seriously.

They met in the middle and pegged the world's currencies to the U.S. dollar, and the dollar was set at 1/35 of an ounce of gold -- hence the 30 years in which gold would forever be set at $35 an ounce and the U.S. dollar would be the "reserve" currency of other nations. It was considered rock solid, and other countries kept supplies of the dollar in their treasuries to guarantee their own financial solvency.

It stabilized the world's currencies and worked until 1971, when the United States posted its first trade deficit. Imports surpassed exports by $2 billion.

President Richard Nixon wanted to encourage more purchase of American goods but to do that he needed to devalue the U.S. dollar. He unpegged it from the gold standard, the dollar dropped accordingly and, from there the free-floating currency was born.

But Nixon's move didn't end inflation and it also didn't end Bretton Woods as a working legacy.

During that 1944 meeting, the central bankers at Bretton Woods created two institutions intended to stabilize world economies.

The first was the International Monetary Fund, a semi-autonomous board that would first advise economically chaotic nations on how to set things aright, then direct massive infusions of money to their banks to guarantee results.

The other was the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a maker of long-term loans. Today it is called the World Bank.

At the end of World War I, nations penalized Germany to the point of putting its recovery beyond revival. With the World Bank as lender, postwar Germany of the 1950s would rise to become an economic power.

"The essence of the system is still there -- having an international structure for cooperation," said James Boughton, an IMF vice president and the fund's in-house historian.

Where currency rates are no longer as centralized, with the dollar now competing with the Euro -- Mr. Keynes would have been delighted -- reserve currencies take many forms.

But the idea of central planning for a world economy, or at least centralized "tweaking" of markets, remains a fixture. In the years following the recession of the mid-'70s, governments organized blocs of leaders to talk markets.

There was a G-5, a G-7, then a G-8. As nations rose in economic stature, they clamored to be let in on the talks. The G-20 today represents roughly 70 percent of the world's population and more than 80 percent of its wealth.

And it is to the two Bretton Woods legacies -- the IMF and the World Bank -- that the G-20 turns to implement many of its protocols.

Some, such as Daniel Kauffman, former director of global governance for the World Bank, have little doubt that the system of moving wealth to unstable places has helped keep world peace.

"They understood the economic origins of such a world security debacle. Those links between economic development on one hand and national security and world peace were very well understood," he said.

Meeting in London in April, the G-20 leaders issued a list of guidelines that included a massive infusion of capital to the IMF to stabilize some nations.

Poland received more than $20 billion, Mexico another $50 billion, with smaller amounts to other nations.

Mr. Kauffman sees it as self-interest by larger, wealthier nations.

"Obviously, it's not in our interest to have a major economic crisis in Mexico," he said.

In all, added Mr. Boughton, the IMF will issue $333 billion in foreign exchange reserves to its members. While it doesn't answer directly to the G-20, its board of directors comprises people from G-20 nations.

Hence, the money moves in, and the IMF moves it out -- something the G-20 will examine as part of its agenda here Sept. 24-25.

"When you add it up, it amounts to about $750 billion," he said. "It's a lot of money. But it's a big world out there."

That big world, often as not, turns on a strategy put in place at a resort where, as Mr. Coons, the investment researcher, put it, bears outnumber businessmen.