American Big Business in Britain and Germany by Berghahn Volker R

Author:Berghahn, Volker R.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

7. American Investments in Weimar

Germany and Their Risks

Compared to the British reaction to the larger issue of the American economic pressure upon Europe in the 1920s, the Germans were indeed more responsive when it came to modernizing their factories with American help, now that the 1922 trade agreement was fully operative and loans were flowing into the country. Werner Link, in totting up American long-term and short-term loans between 1924 and 1930, arrived at a total of 137 to the tune of $1.3 billion with annual amounts reaching close to $250 million in 1926 and 1928. Short-term American loans amounted to some $94 million. Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, in his very meticulous account of American capital exports, has put together a set of data in which he compared the years 1919–23 with 1924–29.102 These figures have to be held against a total of $9 billion that had been invested worldwide up to February 1930, with world trade between 1925 and 1929 rising by 21 percent.

Apart from the bankers and investors, American firms also returned to Germany to revive pre-1914 and early postwar commercial links or to forge new ones. American FDI went into agencies and production facilities. According to Commerce Department figures, 1,150 American firms sold their products in Germany through permanent representations, and some 79 reopened or built factories. The branches were much the same as before 1914, that is, electrical engineering, chemicals, automobiles, steel and iron products, shoes and leather, and so were the companies. The total value of capital they invested amounted to close to $139 million, with the car industry, to be discussed in detail at the beginning of the next chapter, taking up the largest chunk. As Karl Heinrich Pohl put it in his study of the Weimar economy and foreign policy, “the question of reparations had been transformed from a weapon of French foreign policy into an international business—with preference given to the U.S.… A far-reaching identity of interests had been established between the two countries.”103 He added that the more German indebtedness grew, “the greater would be the interest of American capital in the well-being of the German debtors also in the future.” America’s dynamic optimism spread into virtually all branches of industry.

However, with the benefit of hindsight, it would be very misleading to say that all was well with the expansion and modernization of German industry, even if the indigenous business culture was different from that of Britain and tended to draw positive American comments rather than criticism. Just as in Britain, the problems arose from the structural and attitudinal conditions with which the German economic system, marked by a number of peculiarities, continued to wrestle. There was first of all the issue of the channeling of American loans. Its dimensions and broader implications have become clearer after William McNeil and other historians began to evaluate the files of Parker Gilbert, the Wall Street banker and official Reparations Agent in Germany.104 He was supposed to supervise the implementation of the Dawes Plan.

As Young had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.