Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Montagu Norman’s position may be gathered from the fact that his predecessors in the governorship, almost a hundred of them, had served two-year terms, increased rarely, in time of crisis, to three or even four years. But Norman held the position for twenty-four years (1920-1944), during which he became the chief architect of the liquidation of Britain’s global preeminence.

Norman was a strange man whose mental outlook was one of successfully suppressed hysteria or even paranoia. He had no use for governments and feared democracy. Both of these seemed to him to be threats to private banking, and thus to all that was proper and precious in human life. Strong-willed, tireless, and ruthless, he viewed his life as a kind of cloak-and-dagger struggle with the forces of unsound money which were in league with anarchy and Communism. When he rebuilt the Bank of England, he constructed it as a fortress prepared to defend itself against any popular revolt, with the sacred gold reserves hidden in deep vaults below the level of underground waters which could be released to cover them by pressing a button on the governor’s desk. For much of his life Norman rushed about the world by fast steamship, covering tens of thousands of miles each year, often traveling incognito, concealed by a black slouch hat and a long black cloak, under the assumed name of “Professor Skinner.” His embarkations and debarkations onto and off the fastest ocean liners of the day, sometimes through the freight hatch, were about as unobserved as the somewhat similar passages of Greta Garbo in the same years, and were carried out in a similarly “sincere” effort at self-effacement.

Norman had a devoted colleague in Benjamin Strong, the first governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Strong owed his career to the favor of the Morgan Bank, especially of Henry P. Davison, who made him secretary of the Bankers Trust Company of New York (in succession to Thomas W. Lamont) in 1904, used him as Morgan’s agent in the banking rearrangements following the crash of 1907, and made him vice-president of the Bankers Trust (still in succession to Lamont) in 1909. He became governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as the joint nominee of Morgan and of Kuhn, Loeb, and Company in 1914. Two years later, Strong met Norman for the first time, and they at once made an agreement to work in cooperation for the financial practices they both revered.

These financial practices were explicitly stated many times in the voluminous correspondence between these two men and in many conversations they had, both in their work and at their leisure (they often spent their vacations together for weeks, usually in the south of France).

In the 1920’s, they were determined to use the financial power of Britain and of the United States to force all the major countries of the world to go on the gold standard and to operate it through central banks free from all political control, with all questions of international finance to be settled by agreements by such central banks without interference from governments.

It must not be felt that these heads of the world’s chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather, they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of these investment bankers (also called “international” or “merchant” bankers) who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks. This dominance of investment bankers was based on their control over the flows of credit and investment funds in their own countries and throughout the world. They could dominate the financial and industrial systems of their own countries by their influence over the flow of current funds through bank loans, the discount rate, and the rediscounting of commercial debts; they could dominate governments by their control over current government loans and the play of the international exchanges. Almost all of this power was exercised by the personal influence and prestige of men who had demonstrated their ability in the past to bring off successful financial coups, to keep their word, to remain cool in a crisis, and to share their winning opportunities with their associates. In this system the Rothschilds had been preeminent during much of the nineteenth century, but, at the end of that century, they were being replaced by J. P. Morgan whose central office was in New York, although it was always operated as if it were in London (where it had, indeed, originated as George Peabody and Company in 1838). Old J. P. Morgan died in 1913, but was succeeded by his son of the same name (who had been trained in the London branch until 1901), while the chief decisions in the firm were increasingly made by Thomas W. Lamont after 1924. But these relationships can be described better on a national basis later. At the present stage we must follow the efforts of the central bankers to compel the world to return to the gold standard of 1914 in the postwar conditions following 1918.

The bankers’ point of view was clearly expressed in a series of government reports and international conferences from 1918 to 1933. Among these were the reports of the Cunliffe Committee of Great Britain (August 1918), that of the Brussels Conference of Experts (September 1920), that of the Genoa Conference of the Supreme Council (January 1922), the First World Economic Conference (at Geneva, May 1927), the report of the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry (of 1931), and the various statements released by the World Economic Conference (at London in 1933). These and many other statements and reports called vainly for a free international gold standard, for balanced budgets, for restoration of the exchange rates and reserve ratios customary before 1914, for reductions in taxes and government spending, and for a cessation of all government interference in economic activity either domestic or international. But none of these studies made any effort to assess the fundamental changes in economic, commercial, and political life since 1914. And none gave any indication of a realization that a financial system must adapt itself to such changes. Instead, they all implied that if men would only give up their evil ways and impose the financial system of 1914 on the world, the changes would be compelled to reverse their direction and go back to the conditions of 1914.

Accordingly, the financial efforts of the period after 1918 became concentrated on a very simple (and superficial) goal—to get back to the gold standard—not “a” gold standard but “the” gold standard, by which was meant the identical exchange ratios and gold contents that monetary units had had in 1914.

Restoration of the gold standard was not something which could be done by a mere act of government. It was admitted even by the most ardent advocates of the gold standard that certain financial relationships would require adjustment before the gold standard could be restored. There were three chief relationships involved. These were (1) the problem of inflation, or the relationship between money and goods; (2) the problem of public debts, or the relationship between governmental income and expenditure; and (3) the problem of price parities, or the relationship between price levels of different countries. That these three problems existed was evidence of a fundamental disequilibrium between real wealth and claims on wealth, caused by a relative decrease in the former and increase in the latter.

The problem of public debts arose from the fact that as money (credit) was created during the war period, it was usually made in such a way that it was not in the control of the state or the community but was in the control of private financial institutions which demanded real wealth at some future date for the creation of claims on wealth in the present. The problem of public debt could have been met in one or more of several fashions: (a) by increasing the amount of real wealth in the community so that its price would fall and the value of money would rise. This would restore the old equilibrium (and price level) between real wealth and claims on wealth and, at the same time, would permit payment of the public debt with no increase in the tax rates; (b) by devaluation—that is, reduce the gold content of the monetary unit so that the government’s holdings of gold would be worth a greatly increased number of monetary units. These latter could be applied to the public debt; (c) by repudiation—that is, a simple cancellation of the public debt by a refusal to pay it; (d) by taxation—that is, by increasing the tax rate to a level high enough to yield enough income to pay off the public debt; (e) by the issuance of fiat money and the payment of the debt by such money.