A Financial History of Western Europe | Part 5 — After World War II

This is the last of five sessions on Charles P. Kindleberger's 1993 (1984) book A Financial History of Western Europe.

From the Dust Jacket:

Charles Kindleberger highlights the development of financial institutions to meet emerging needs, and the similarities and contrasts in the handling of financial problems such as transferring resources from one country to another, stimulating investment or financing war and cleaning up the resulting monetary mess. The first half of the book covers money, banking and finance from about 1450 to 1913; the second deals in considerably more detail with the twentieth century.

In his latest book, Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System, Perry Mehrling says:

"In Charlie's mind, this book was to be his culminating treatise on international money, and, if we want to understand it, that is how we must attempt to read it."

There are two editions of this book, which are fairly similar. We will organize our discussion around the 1993 second edition, but it's fine to participate with the 1984 first edition.

This week, we discuss the four chapters in Part 5: After World War II.

• Chapter 22: German Finance in and After World War II
• Chapter 23: Lend-Lease, the British Loan, the Marshall Plan
• Chapter 24: European Financial Integration
• Chapter 25: Europe in the World Financial System

This final part of the book contains the most differences between the first and second editions of the book. Chapter 24 is partly reorganized and rewritten in the second edition. Chapter 25 is new.