Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

by Liaquat Ahamed

Roosevelt did not even pretend to grasp fully the subtleties of international finance; but unlike Churchill, he refused to allow himself to be in the least bit intimidated by the subject’s technicalities—when told by one of his advisers that something was impossible, his response was “Poppycock!” Instead, he approached the subject with a sort of casual insouciance that his economic advisers found unnerving but which nevertheless allowed him to cut through the complications and go to the heart of the matter. His simplistic view was that since the Depression had been associated with falling prices, recovery could only come about when prices began going the other way. His advisers patiently tried to explain to him that he had the causality backward—that rising prices would be the result of recovery, not its cause. They were themselves only half right. For in an economy where everything is connected, there is often no clear distinction between cause and effect. True, in the initial stages of the Depression the collapse in economic activity had driven prices downward. But once in motion, falling prices created their own dynamic. By raising the real cost of borrowing, they had discouraged investment and thus caused economic activity to weaken further. Effect became cause and cause became effect.

If commodity prices fell because of a shortage of gold, he argued, then one way to raise them was to raise the price of gold—in other words, to devalue the dollar. An increase of 50 percent in the price of bullion was no different in its effects from suddenly discovering 50 percent more of the metal. Both brought about a higher value of gold within the credit system and both would therefore stimulate higher commodity prices.

The combination of the renewed confidence in banks, a newly activist Fed, and a government that seemed intent on driving prices higher broke the psychology of deflation, a change reflected in almost every indicator.

With the president’s hands on the lever, the Fed itself was now “completely in the dark as to what our policy is or is to be.”

He feared that the United States was now abdicating that position, that the dollar devaluation might be a first predatory step in a full-scale currency war as countries tried to weaken their exchange rates in order to steal markets from one another and that the world might be entering a period of monetary anarchy.

Roosevelt, who by now had begun taking his cue from the commodity exchanges and stock markets, dispatched a cable to the American delegates curtly reminding them that they were there to focus on plans for economic recovery and were not to be sidetracked by the European obsession with currency stabilization. Moreover, the White House went out of its way to disavow any knowledge of Harrison’s activities, pointedly reminding reporters that he was not a representative of the government but of the New York Fed, an independent entity. With the rug pulled out from underneath him and feeling betrayed, Harrison returned to New York—he told friends that “he felt as if he had been kicked in the face by a mule.” It was a lesson that the old days of the “Most Exclusive Club in the World,” when central bankers meeting in private could set credit and currency conditions without reference to politicians, were now gone.

Morgenthau; Jesse Jones, the head of the RFC; and George Warren would meet with the president over his breakfast of soft-boiled eggs, to determine the price of gold for that day. They began at $31.36 an ounce. The next morning this increased to $31.54, then $31.76 and $31.82. No one had a clue how they went about setting the price, although everyone presumed that some subtle analyses of the world bullion and foreign exchange markets went into their calculations. In fact, the choice of price was completely random. All they were trying to do was push the price a little higher than the day before. The exercise brought out the juvenile in Roosevelt. One day he picked an increase of 21 cents, and when asked why, replied that it was a lucky number, three times seven.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. —FRANCIS

Displaying the inventive genius that distinguished him as the most creative central banker of his era, immediately upon taking office, Schacht threw the whole baggage of orthodox economics overboard. He embarked on a massive program of public works financed by borrowing from the central bank and printing money.

Behind the gleaming achievements, therefore—the autobahns, the Volkswagen, the Junker bombers, and the Messerschmitt fighter planes—the Nazi economy was a rickety machine plagued by shortages and relying heavily on rationing to allocate scarce consumer goods.

“Don’t forget what desperate straits the Allies drove us into. They hemmed us in from all sides—they fairly strangled us! Just try to imagine what a cultured people like the Germans has to go through to fall for a demagogue like Hitler. . . . All we wanted was some possibility for export, for trade, to live somehow.

economists are the “trustees, not of civilization, but of the possibility of civilization.”