Abstract
With the world’s financial markets always on the eve of going into turmoil, the press today is full of worried comment about the consequences of globalization, the fear that regulatory institutions are no longer adequate to their task and — almost for the first time — references to the Great Crash of 1929. This essay does not attempt a comparison of the interwar crisis and the situation today. However, it may be of some contemporary interest in so far as it surveys relations between two of the chief regulatory agencies in the earlier period, the Bank of France and the Bank of England. The survey is deliberately non-technical, its purpose being to put into political perspective the obstacles to co-operation between the two banks.
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Notes
The trade issues are developed in R. W. D. Boyce, British Capitalism at the Crossroads, 1919–1932: a Study in Politics, Economics and International Relations (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 99–100, 127–30.
E. Moreau, Souvenirs d’un Gouverneur de la Banque de France (Paris, 1954), pp. 506–9; Charles Addis diary, 28 Feb. 1928. The confrontation appears to have been encouraged by Joseph Avenol of the Quai d’Orsay, see Avenol to Quesnay, 17 Feb. 1928, MAE 006, Papiers Avenol 37.
This is the basis of analysis in D. E. Moggridge, British Monetary Policy, 1924–1931: the Norman Conquest of $4.86 (Cambridge, 1972), the standard work on the subject.
B. R. Mitchell and P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962), p. 477; for wages pp. 352–3.
Ibid.; Leith Ross minute to Sir R. Vansittart, 2 Dec. 1931, Foreign Office (hereafter FO) 371/15640, W56/56/17; Séance 5 Dec. 1930, BqFr CG; minute by Waley, 30 Jan. 1931, T160/430, F12317/2; Leith-Ross to Fergusson, 17 February 1931, T160/430, F12317/2; Sir H. Clay, Lord Norman, (London, 1957), pp. 370–1.
The conversations are summarized in K. Mouré, Managing the Franc Poincaré: Economic Understanding and Political Constraint in French Monetary Policy, 1928–1936 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 58–65; Boyce, British Capitalism at the Crossroads, pp. 294–9.
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© 2002 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Boyce, R. (2002). ‘Breaking the Banque’: the Great Crisis in Franco-British Central Bank Relations between the Wars. In: Chassaigne, P., Dockrill, M. (eds) Anglo-French Relations 1898–1998. Studies in Military and Strategic History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403907127_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403907127_8
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