As a businessman, financier, diplomat, minister and the first managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Camille Gutt (1884-1971) was involved in all the important financial negotiations that took place between the 1920s and the 1950s. Crombois uses Gutt's personal archives to examine the rise and fall of financial diplomacy as a largely private enterprise. He looks at how financial diplomacy and official diplomacy differed, and confronts the confusion between private and public interests, the high level of informality in the financial sector and the growth of postwar self-identification with national interests.