Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

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Henry Morgenthau Jr. was a long-time friend and neighbour of FDR at his Hyde Park estate in upstate New York. He had no background in economics and, upon his appointment as Treasury Secretary in 1934, the prominent New York donor Gladys Straus quipped that Roosevelt had managed to find ‘the only Jew in the world who doesn't know a thing about money’.ssss1 White rapidly made himself indispensable as the intellectual force behind Morgenthau's expanding power base, while Morgenthau served as a powerful patron for the ambitious White.

In 1935, Morgenthau despatched White on a trip to Europe to engage in fact-finding and exploratory talks on the matter of exchange rate stabilisation. This trip was to have great significance in Harry White's career, as his meetings with politicians, businessmen, bankers, civil servants and economists would help to position him later as the obvious candidate to coordinate and lead America's international negotiations on the post-war monetary system. It was also on this trip that he first met John Maynard Keynes, the famed British economist with whom he would later joust in the run-up to and during the 1944 Bretton Woods conference.