Word: banke
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Closing the Bank. But if it was Britain that was broke, why was the conference in Washington? Why not in London? The conferees hoped that the answer to that question would be grasped from Portland, Me. to Portland, Ore. For in the world of 1947, Britain's predicament, no matter what its cause, was of as much concern to the U.S. as to Britain herself. Out of self-interest, if for no other reason, the U.S. could not afford...
...conferees could bring about no full solution of the crisis; that was for the U.S. Congress and for Parliament, if a solution could be found. What the conferees could do they did. They suspended convertibility, froze what was left of Britain's loan, and in effect closed the bank, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did on the first day of the New Deal...
Producing the Goods. These were obviously temporary measures. The problem now was how to reopen the bank and keep it in as healthy a condition as possible. Under the present state of world affairs, this called for more than just financial aid to Britain. It meant that the U.S. would probably have to take over Britain's share of keeping Germany alive. Since money is nothing if it is not backed by goods, it also meant that Britain would have to increase her own lagging production...
...Bank. When the British accepted the hard bargain driven by the U.S., they tried to make a virtue of necessity and kidded themselves that lifting of restrictions on "current transactions" would work. It did not. Traders in other countries wanted dollars more and pounds less than the British Treasury thought they would. The British pound had so little production back of it compared to the U.S. dollar that when anybody owning pounds had a choice he converted them into dollars, with which he had more chance of buying the food or shoes or trucks or machinery he wanted...
...goods to the U.S. The staggering adverse balance of almost half a billion in U.S. dollars made a big dent in the Dominion's war-hoarded reserves, even though hard-pressed Britain helped out by paying Canada in U.S. dollars for $220 million worth of food. The Bank of Canada's Graham Towers, who knows, was not telling how many U.S. dollars Canada had left, but at this rate the year-end balance of $1,250,000,000 would not last long...