Word: creditors
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...maintain peace, but just as disruptive of an international economic system. It was the failure of the U.S. to assume Britain's old role of lender to the world. Following World War I, it was taken for granted in banking circles that the U.S., now a leading creditor nation, would take on the job. Ambitious young Americans preparing for careers in finance spent a year or so after college in the City of London to pick up the British art and take it home with them. Sons of eminent European families, sensing the trend of power, got themselves apprentice...
While bankers and investors were thus ignoring the greatest economic opportunity that had ever been handed ready-made to a financial community, the politicians in Washington were compounding their economic solecisms. Tariffs, which caused the U.S. to run an export surplus when, as a creditor, it should have collected its interest in the form of an import surplus, were hiked even higher by the Hawley-Smoot rates of 1930. The Ottawa Agreements, raising a tariff wall around the British Commonwealth, the quota systems, the blocked exchanges, the abandonment of gold - these were the complex but natural sequences of U.S. unwillingness...
...which, for a considerable period after the war, will have to import more goods than they export. Most European nations will become debtors to the White stabilization fund (or the Keynes Clearing Union) while a few nations in the Western Hemisphere, pre-eminently the U.S., will become its chief creditors. Meanwhile, Britain, in buying more from the U.S. than it sells to the U.S., while selling more to the Continent than it buys, would have the net effect of increasing the position of 1) the U.S. as creditor; 2) Europe as debtor. Thus, said Anderson, the U.S. will underwrite...
...order to prevent abuse of either plan-whether by debtor nations failing to put their affairs in order or by creditor nations erecting tariff walls, etc. to prevent payments in goods-it would be necessary for the international stabilization fund to put pressure on the offenders. The necessity of doing this, said Dr. Anderson, would force the fund to become "a supernational Brain Trust to think for the world...
...either situation both the White fund and the Clearing Union would try to correct the trade discrepancy. Significantly, however, the White plan places most emphasis on a nation which is constantly a debtor. With an eye on the U.S., Keynes insists on the responsibility of a creditor to accept, imports and lower tariffs...