They've got a secret

Adam LeBor's history of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Tower of Basel, reads a little like a financial version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the Tom Stoppard play that places two minor characters in Hamlet in the forefront of the action while the drama's major events unfold incomprehensibly in the background. In Mr LeBor's telling, the BIS, an obscure "bank for central banks" set up in Basel, Switzerland, in 1930 to facilitate World War I reparations payments from Germany, has been a critical, if secretive, actor in the global economy for more than 80 years. Today, he writes, it is "the most important bank in the world," an institution with virtually no accountability, and yet "for decades it has stood at the centre of a global network of money, power and covert global influence."

The BIS has indeed had a fascinating and sometimes shady history on the front lines of major events, including the Great Depression, World War II and the formation of the European Monetary Union. But in reality it has been more of a witness to history than a maker of it, more Forrest Gump than Superman. Today the BIS is less "the secret bank that runs the world," as Mr LeBor's conspiratorial-sounding subtitle has it, than a clubby meeting place for central bankers. International finance is now largely dictated by global banking corporations, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the other major central banks that make up the membership of the BIS. More often than not, they base their policy on national or regional interest.

Even so, there are good reasons to tell the full story of the bank, and Mr LeBor, a journalist based in Budapest, does a creditable job in this well-researched account.

Born in secrecy in 1930, the BIS came of age in sin. It was partly the brainchild of Montagu Norman, the Depression-era governor of the Bank of England, who cut a somewhat Mephistophelian figure with his cape and Van Dyke beard, and who also played a starring (if disastrous) role in Liaquat Ahamed's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2009 book Lords of Finance. Norman wanted a new bank that would serve as the "world's first international financial institution," Mr LeBor writes. "It would be a meeting place for central bankers. Away from the demands of politicians and the prying eyes of nosy journalists, the bankers would bring some much needed order and coordination to the world financial system."

Norman's proposal gained an eager advocate in Hjalmar Schacht, another great Faustian figure of 20th-century finance. Schacht, the Reichsbank president, saw the new bank as a way of easing Germany's reparations burden and later took part in junking the whole apparatus as the Nazis seized power, brilliantly outmanoeuvring the Allied governments. In the 1930s, Schacht's financial wizardry in helping to build Adolf Hitler's war economy on the sly delighted the Führer, who remarked that his chief banker had showed that "even in the field of sharp finance a really intelligent Aryan is more than a match for his Jewish counterparts."

The start of World War II ushered in the BIS' darkest period, and one of the most shameful episodes in the history of finance. Like Switzerland itself, neutral Basel became an "international oasis," but one that served the Nazis far more than the Allies. The BIS' directors helped to sell gold seized by the Nazis from occupied nations and culled from the teeth of death camp victims, and they acted as a conduit of hard currency that allowed the Third Reich to buy raw materials throughout the war - to the point where Emil Puhl, the Reichsbank vice president, described the BIS as the "only real foreign branch" of the Reichsbank. Puhl's friend Thomas McKittrick, the bank's American president through the war, "repeatedly passed economic and financial intelligence to the Reichsbank leadership,"

The BIS' morally tainted wartime experience almost sank it at the 1944 conference at Bretton Woods, NH, when Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and Harry Dexter White, the lead American delegate to the conference, sought to liquidate it while setting up the postwar international system dominated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. But the BIS' powerful friends, including John Maynard Keynes, intervened to save it.

Today the BIS has reached a kind of enlightened old age as a venue for the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which seeks to set voluntary global capital standards, and as a repository of financial expertise. The BIS' economic research staff has often been a prescient prognosticator of the debt overleveraging that has plagued banking from the Asia crisis of the late 1990s to the subprime mortgage disaster a decade later. Yet as Mr LeBor concedes, "knowing there was a problem, however, did not mean the bank could always persuade policy makers to take preventative or remedial measures."

Even now, the BIS operates with less disclosure than the 18 central banks that make up its executive committee. Its assets are protected against seizure. Its process of establishing capital requirements for banks remains opaque and too mild in its prescriptions. Yet the BIS lives on as enduring proof that while it's often easy to create international institutions, it's very hard to get rid of them.

©2013 The New York Times News Service

TOWER OF BASEL
The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World
Adam LeBor
PublicAffairs; 323 pages; $28.99