Money lenders
- London Hodder and Stoughton 1981
- 336 p.
This is a book about the relationship between bankers and nations, particularly developing nations from England in the fourteenth century to the United States in the nineteenth century to the many coloured developing world of the 1980s. I try to show how banks grew up into the huge global organisations that we know today, and how they operate across frontiers in the contemporary world; but I do not attempt to cover the many complex activities of domestic banking and the economic theories that lie behind them. My interest is in the interna tional politics of banking, and the personalities that lie behind them. Many economists have described banking in terms of the interplay of macro-economic forces; but this book tries to show how banks are also affected by the character of their leaders and the problems of particular competition, and I have tried to show how the world looks through the eyes of individual bankers.
In a subject of such huge geographical and historical dimensions, I have had to be very selective, following the fortunes of a few distinctive bankers and providing case-histories of significant countries, which show special problems and crises in the relationship. But I have also tried to look at the relationship from the point of view of the nations, and at the wider problems of their development, trade and prosperity. I have tried to show how the world institutions grew up after the second world war and how the dispensing of foreign aid raised new hopes followed by disillusion; while in the last chapters the two themes begin to converge, as bankers' problems have overlapped with the problems of aid and the reform of the world economic system.