The Great Crash by Selwyn Parker

Author:Selwyn Parker [PARKER, SELWYN ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little Brown
Published: 2010-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

Takahashi appears to have had no formal schooling at all. He learned fluent colloquial English from American missionaries. By the age of twelve he was an errand boy for a Scots banker, then briefly a house boy in San Francisco, before returning to Japan at the age of fourteen where he would help translate into Japanese Alfred Marshall’s The Pure Theory of Modern Trade for the benefit of the government. An omnivorous student, Takahashi was familiar with hundreds of important English-language books on economics, society and related subjects. Unusually outward-looking in an introverted nation, he built up a network of important and useful acquaintances, bankers in particular, throughout Britain and America that stood him in good stead. Jack Morgan became acquainted with Takahashi after Morgan, Grenfell helped raise several large Japanese loans in the 1920s.

Starting from this unpromising background, Takahashi rose steadily up the ranks of bureaucracy under the emperors through sheer doggedness and talent. His high reputation in the capital markets of the west saved Japan more than once. He financed Japan’s nearly ruinous 1904-05 war with Russia by raising the money in Europe with the help of the Rothschilds (the famous banking family spent a portion of their enormous fees on a sumptuous dinner at the Savoy Hotel as a mark of respect for the little Japanese central banker). Having rescued his country once, Takahashi did so again in six inspired weeks during another financial crisis in 1927. Now, in his late seventies, he was once again performing miracles.

Unlike many cloistered economists in the west, Takahashi saw his economic constituency as the general population, certainly not the ruling classes and absolutely not the military. He had learned, Smethurst noted, ‘the importance of insuring that “rich country” (fukoku) meant rich people and that “strong army” (kohei) did not get out of hand’. As a result, the Depression was essentially over in Japan within little more than a year.

Unfortunately, Takahashi did not live to see all the fruits of his work. Having revived the economy, he began to draw the reins lest everything be put in jeopardy. Thus he reduced the military budget at a time when empire-builders were demanding ships, planes and unlimited supplies of weapons of war. A committed democrat who had resigned his ennoblements - he had been made viscount by a grateful emperor - Takahashi believed an economy should serve the needs of all rather than the ambitions of a few. In a country where assassinations were almost routine, he knew the risks he was running; ‘I am prepared to die now,’ he once confided to a friend. On 26 February 1936, he was brutally murdered by army officers.

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