Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Using the Bank of International Settlements as their agent, European states were encouraged to secure credit lines proportional to their trading requirements. Then, instead of using up scarce dollars they could settle their obligations through an intra-European transfer of credits. All that mattered was not whom you traded with but the overall balance of credits and debits in European currencies. By the time it was wound up in 1958, the Payments Union had quietly contributed not merely to the steady expansion of intra-European trade but to an unprecedented degree of mutually advantageous collaboration—financed, it should be noted, by a substantial injection of US dollars to furnish the initial credit pool.