Lords of Finance

spending on

U.S. entry into

World War II

World War Foreign Debt Commission

Young Liberal Association

Young, Owen D.

appearance of

and Dawes Committee/Plan

and divisiveness within Fed System

and French-German relations

and German economy

and Norman-Lamont agreement

personal and professional background of

selling of stock positions by

strategy of

Young, Roy

Young Conference (Paris, 1929)

Young Plan

Zaharoff, Basil

1 The monopoly need not be complete. In Britain, while the Bank of England was granted a monopoly of currency in 1844, Scottish banks continued to issue currency and existing English banks with the authority to issue currency were grandfathered. The last private English banknotes were issued in 1921 by Fox, Fowler and Company, a Somerset bank.

2 Eventually the government would end up assuming the risk on all this unpaid trade debt until the end of the war.

3 The origins of the dispute were so arcane that Lord Palmerston famously remarked that only three men in the world fully understood them: Prince Albert, who was dead; a clerk in the Foreign Office, whom it had driven mad; and Palmerston himself, who had forgotten.

4 Many years later, when he was a prominent official, the libretto was much to his embarrassment made public. Schacht sued the man responsible.

5 On September 22, 1914, Captain von Romberg was killed in action, one of the first German officers to die in the war. See “Baron Von Romberg Killed,” New York Times, September 30, 1914.

6 Pierpont Morgan died in 1913 without ever occupying the apartment. It was until very recently a restaurant.

7 By the mid-1920s, the New York Fed was two and a half times as large as its nearest rival, Chicago, and some ten times greater than the smallest Federal Reserve bank, that of Minneapolis.

8 Then the equivalent of $400, 2,000 francs was well below the wage of a typical skilled American worker.

9 The gold standard was officially suspended in Germany and France in August 1914. In Britain, the government maintained the legal fiction that the gold standard was still in operation. Theoretically, British citizens could demand gold for their Bank of England notes and were, until May 1917, free to export gold. In reality the threat posed by German submarines made insurance prohibitively high and gold exports were never feasible.

10 That same ethos seems to have extended to the senior employees. Kenneth Grahame, the children’s author, joined the Bank of England in 1879 and rose through the ranks, eventually becoming secretary. In 1895, he published The Golden Age, a book not about bullion but childhood. In 1907 he retired, after having been shot during an unsuccessful robbery attempt at the Bank, and the following year published The Wind in the Willows.

11 By comparison, the Bank of the United States, the primary bank of issue for a country with one-sixth of France’s population, was capitalized at $10 million.