As I said previously, I've been reading Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance while in Basle. This seems appropriate, as the book recounts the creation of the Bank of International Settlements, among other events.
The book has been a fun and informative read, but I was particularly struck by an excerpt from a newspaper article that Ahamed quoted. The New York World decided to advise Americans travelling to France in the summer of 1926. At the time, the French were a bit tetchy about U.S. insistence that the French government repay its First World War debts in fill:
Don't boast in cafes that American currency is the only real honest-to-God money in the world. It isn't. Besides such bursts of financial patriotism are annoying to people who did not spend the years 1914 to 1916 accumulating world credit by selling munitions, cotton and wheat to other nations which were busy with a war....
Don't confide to your fellow passengers on raileay trains that America is the most generous of creditors because America has cancelled all that part of debts which nobody can collect. Talk instead of our prowess in tennis, golf or Prohibition. It comes with better grace.
Is it just me, or does that seem much snarkier than most commentary you would read today?
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