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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (9772)	11/11/2001 8:11:32 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The BIS was established by the same crowd who later set up the IMF and the World Bank. The establishment of the BIS was agreed to in 1929, and it came into being in April, 1930. The US, which was never officially involved in German reparations, sent delegates from the House of Morgan, Thomas Lamont and Owen Young, to a conference in Paris to deal with German reparations and allied repayment of loans incurred during WWI. The BIS was set up to act as a clearinghouse for German reparations, and also to regulate the international flow of gold and set exchange rates. In fact, the plan was called the Young Plan, after Owen Young, and he got a Nobel prize for it. The German representative was Hjalmar Schacht, who I mentioned to you in an earlier post about German reparations. Schacht was the President of the Reichsbank who claimed in his autobiography that he deliberately crashed the German stock market in 1927, and later was Hitler's banker and financial advisor. Schacht went back to Germany, and told the German government that the reparations plan was too onerous, but the German government signed it anyway, so he resigned his post from the Reichsbank, and later helped finance Hitler. He always claimed that the BIS was his idea. The Nazis really liked the BIS. It was a great place to store looted gold, and it was also a great place to find more gold to loot. >>After October 1938, the second, hyphenated, Czecho-Slovak Republic existed only briefly, until 15 March 1939, when, at the "invitation" of President Emil Hácha, units of the Wehrmacht entered the country. With them came Dr Friedrich Muller, special commissioner of the German Reichsbank, who headed directly for the Národní banka pro Èechy a Moravu (National Bank for Bohemia and Moravia) in Prague. There he demanded at gunpoint that the directors sign letters transferring 23 tonnes of gold from the Czech BIS account at the Bank of England to another BIS account held there. This request was promptly executed by the Bank of England. (1) When this act was belatedly discovered by the British press and debated in the House of Commons in May and June 1939 (2), there was a general sense of outrage, and accusations flew, especially that a second "Financial Munich" had been perpetrated on the hapless Czech population. One MP, Winston Churchill, was particularly vocal, arguing that through this action German war coffers were increased by millions.<< ce-review.org I think the BIS has made a great effort to put all this behind them, but the fact remains that they are part of the same "zombie bureaucracy" you decried. BTW, historically, the US was not a member of the BIS. My recollection is that we joined very recently, but I see on one Fed website that the Fed is not a member of the BIS. chicagofed.org But the Fed does attend the meetings and does have voting rights.