The Soviet Union in those days did not want to hold too many dollars in New York, where they risked being confiscated if the Cold War turned nastier. But they did not want to invest in sterling either, the risky money of a collapsing empire. They saw their chance in this new market: they could hold dollars in London. So, starting with a deposit of a few hundred thousand by the Moscow Narodny bank in 1957, they began to pile in. Karl Marx would have raised his prodigious eyebrows at the irony of an avowedly Marxist nation nurturing the most unfettered capitalist system in history.
One of the most educative examples of sheer hypocrisy.
