General Conclusion: The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions

Abstract

On looking back over the events of the last decade my overriding impression is of a learning process. In the same way that a battlefield commander is making history by every action he takes, while at the same time the information he has is imperfect and difficult to absorb under the pressure of the moment, so commercial bankers have for the past decade both been making history and been trying to understand what was going on on the basis of limited information and an incomplete theoretical structure into which to fit it. If this book tells a logical tale, this is because the story has been pieced together over a period and in many cases after the event. Not all the analysis took place retrospectively, but in earlier years analysis was inevitably tentative and speculative. Mistakes were made by bankers as well as by policy makers. But it is immature to take the evident existence of mistakes as an excuse for simply castigating certain participants in this situation without discrimination and without analysis. Had the commercial banks had total forsight and refused point blank in the mid-1970s to lend money to the oil-importing countries, that would have been very disruptive as regards their relations with their own governments, international organisations, and the developing countries, who all believed that recycling should take place.