Basically the precondition of American aid was continent-wide recovery coordination. Which required stable currencies and convertibility. Which required a completed recovery. Chicken-egg. Solved via payments union and trade quotas. Command economy it till you get to free market.
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European currencies remained inconvertible till 1958 🤯
So it took 13 years for WW2 destabilization effects to be surgically stabilized with a command economy before free-float trade was possible again.
How long for Covid destabilizations?
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Scheme required each country to fill out very detailed questionnaires on economic production. They mostly just made it up. The US thought they’d police each other’s accuracy. Instead they colluded in don’t-ask-don’t-tell mutual obfuscation. Including Americans running Germany.
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Weird how we think of Cold Watmr as capitalist west vs command economy East. But there was no real capitalism for much of the period. Soviets had 5-year plans, Western Europe had Marshall Plan. The US had military-industrial complex. Real capitalism was in eclipse 1929-1989.
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Still the plan was clearly to get off planning models. Will Clayton played Europe-whisperer nudging the discussions and proposal into the right shape via backchannel pressure and slight strong-arming of expressions of autonomy. Not Stalin-grade though.
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Clayton’s 3 requirements for a successful funding proposal:
1. Explain why finding to date hadn’t fueled recovery
2. A 3-4 year plan to fix this by production program
3. A blueprint for a European economic federation
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Plus yay/nay to features. Bilateral deals/tariffs under ITO logic bad. Customs union/free trade zones a la Benelux good.
This was an early version of the IMF/WB economic liberalization playbook of the 80s/90s clearly. Much less sophisticated and tied to Bretton-Woods spookiness.
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The Europeans resisted mightily. Wanted to retain bilateralism, tariffs and quotas over multilateralism, free trade.
In a way Trump’s Europe actions have been about trying to dismantle all this. His is the anti-Marshall non-plan.
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It’s clear that the preference is almost entirely due to the greater opportunities for corporatist grift and cronyism in a 1:1 opaque bilateral world as opposed to an n:n transparent multilateral world. The US wanted to legibilize Europe.
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Replying to
Fascinating. You do get the sense that Trump, Navarro, & co have the POV that being in power = the power to punish enemies and reward friends, so it's interesting to consider how/why that was squeezed out of the system post-WWII
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At that point it would also have been a century old habit in Europe dating to Victoria and Bismarck. They wouldn’t have known any other way. Even the US was playing the tariffs game by default till WW1 almost I think. Open trade was a genuinely new doctrine of robber baron era.
I think because the Robber Barons had global tech monopolies briefly. They weren’t in old world artisan commodities trades like wool for wine. Mass industrial production doesn’t like cutting special deals through layers of brokers cobbling small supplies together.
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So it wasn't rooted in the altruistic desire to lift the rest of the world out of poverty? You don't say!
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