Concern is rising “in many quarters” that America is “retreating from global economic leadership” warns the New York Times. This comes as the International Monetary Fund gathers for its spring meeting at Washington. This retreat is coming, adds the Times, just when leadership is “needed most.” The retreat turns out to consist of a reluctance in Congress to give the Chinese communists a bigger vote in the IMF and a refusal to let the IMF keep some $100 billion that we lent it early in the Great Recession.

What the Times means by global economic “leadership” is this: America cedes ground to the last remaining big power ruled by the Communist Party. Plus America pays for the privilege with money borrowed from said communist power. This, the Times reports, has “filled Washington with motorcades and traffic jams and loaded the schedules of President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew,” as a divided government “is on the verge of ceding the economic stage it built at the end of World War II.”

“On the verge”? The Times is talking about, in the IMF, an institution that has been dwindling for more than a generation. It was — and was supposed to be — one of the centerpieces of the Bretton Woods Agreements that were struck in the closing months of World War II. What was the central feature of the Bretton Woods treaty and the monetary system it created? The idea was that the world would link its currencies to the dollar that America would link to gold.

That was leadership. It was a commitment by the American Congress to exercise the power granted to it in the Constitution to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin.” And to exercise said power in a responsible and steady fashion. Congress regulated the value of the dollar at a 35th of an ounce of gold. That was the act of leadership. It was a political and moral commitment. Countries around the world bet on it, and so began the great American ascendancy.

That lasted from the end of World War II until 1971. During that span America’s average unemployment rate was 4.7%, the bankruptcy rate was low and steady, and the inequality indices that Thos. Piketty likes to cite were trending gently downward. Then, in 1971, came the collapse of Bretton Woods. America closed the gold window. The Sun has used the term “default” to describe the Nixon Shock. Default or not, progress stopped, and the problems began to show. Unemployment rose, bankruptcies rose, inequality rose.

Today, when the political mandarins in Washington talk about IMF “reform” in Washington, they do not refer to a restoration of a system of sound money. They are talking about giving a bigger role in the IMF to communist China. They are talking about changing the allocation of the quotas in the IMF, stuffing it with more fiat money. This despite the black letter of the Bretton Woods Agreement Act, which lists “certain acts not to be taken without authorization.”

Here’s the way the black letter of the law puts it in reference to the IMF: “Unless Congress by law authorizes such action, neither the President nor any person or agency shall on behalf of the United States (a) request or consent to any change in the quota of the United States . . .” The italics we have added to emphasize the stark nature of the law that the Obama administration is breaking. It seems the only person who grasps this is Congressman Jeb Hensarling, chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services.

It is long past time for Congress to take a fundamental look at the International Monetary Fund, which is approaching its 70th anniversary. The Obama administration is fit to be tied that the Chinese communists, capped in the IMF, are setting up their own development bank. That’s their business. Our business ought to be to follow the letter and spirit of the American law, and we wouldn’t put another nickel into the IMF absent a restoration of sound money. None of the Bretton Woods institutions make sense without it.