Edward Bernstein, Economics Expert, Is Dead at 91

Edward M. Bernstein, who, as a leading international economist helped negotiate the international monetary system at Bretton Woods, N.H., near the end of World War II, died on Saturday at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington. He was 91 and lived in Washington.

Dr. Bernstein was born in Bayonne, N.J., grew up in Queens and was a copy boy for The New York World while attending De Witt Clinton High School. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1927 and a doctorate in economics from Harvard in 1931. He went on to be a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina.

From 1940 to 1946, he was a Treasury Department official. In that role, in 1944, he was an adviser to the United States delegation to the Bretton Woods Conference, whose formal name was the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. The conference resulted in the founding of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development -- known as the World Bank -- and the founding of the International Monetary Fund, with the mission of promoting international monetary cooperation.

One of Dr. Bernstein's feats was convincing the British economist and monetary expert John Maynard Keynes, who led the British delegation to Bretton Woods, that, contrary to the opinion then prevailing among American economists, there would not be a grave depression in the United States after World War II. His reasoning was that the United States had given up the gold standard in 1933 and would no longer allow gold reserves to regulate the money supply's growth.

Dr. Bernstein went on to be the first director of research at the International Monetary Fund, from 1946 to 1958, when he left to found EMB Ltd., a Washington economic consulting and research organization. He was its president until 1981, and his clients included large multinational companies and central banks of foreign countries. Later he was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution for more than a decade.

His survivors include his wife of 60 years, the former Edith Lewis; three sons, Daniel L., of Bronxville, N.Y., Alan S., of Dallas, and George L., of New Orleans, and four grandchildren.