Government officials were able to exercise fairly effective control over domestic investment especially because, throughout these initial post-war decades, currency laws and the limited mobility of international capital held back foreign competition. Restricted in their freedom to seek out more profitable short-term returns abroad, bankers and private lenders in France and elsewhere invested at home.6 In West Germany, where the abiding inter-war memory was of conflict and instability (political and monetary alike), the authorities in Bonn were much less active than their French or Italian
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