Economic Warfare
Oscar winning
screenwriter Graham Moore (“Imitation Game”) has written an international
economics book in the guise of an historical novel. Moore’s topics involve
America’s economic war against Germany prior to our direct entrance into the
war in December 1941 and the need to establish a postwar economic architecture
that would avoid the foibles of the interwar years. The idea of economic
warfare has relevance to today given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and ongoing
trade issues with China.
Moore’s protagonists
are Minnesota tax attorney Ansel Luxford and his wife Angela who end up working
in Washington D.C. in 1939. Moore goes to work for senior Treasury advisor
Harry Dexter White in a super-secret group dedicated to disrupting the Nazi economy
and Angela who finds a job as a clerk in the F.B.I. All of the characters in
the book are real people and Moore lets the reader know where his account
diverged from the historical record. The group initially fails in preventing
Brazil from exporting iron ore to Germany largely because of
State Department
opposition led by the Nazi sympathizing Assistant Secretary of State
Breckenridge Long. Long also worked tirelessly to prevent Jewish immigration to
the United States.
After the initial
failure with Brazil, the group succeeds in freezing German funds in the United
States, comes up with the cash and carry scheme to allow France and England to
purchase war materials from the United States and accurately predicts that Hitler
would have to invade Poland because the German economy was based on continuous
plunder.
There is much
dialogue between British economist and treasury aide John Maynard Keynes and
Harry Dexter White. Most of the dialogue is derived from written communications
between them. It is no secret that these two did not get along and had serious
differences of opinion. This came to a head at the Bretton Woods Conference in
1944 where Keynes backed his proposed international currency, the Bancor, while
White succeeded in having the gold convertible U.S. Dollar as the core of
global finance.
We don’t find out
until the very end that Harry Dexter White was all along a Soviet spy. Ansel
and Angela discover this when they witness a “dead drop” in the New Hampshire
woods outside of the conference.
Moore utilized the
works of Adam Tooze in explaining Nazi finance, Zachary Carter on Keynes’ views
on the economics of global peace, and Benn Steil on the Bretton Woods
Conference. He also threw in for good measure a vignette on one of the members
of the team buying a used car which highlighted the role of information
asymmetry that won George Ackerlof the Nobel Prize.
My few qualms about
the book are that Moore seems to tilt too much towards modern monetary theory
in explaining how the U.S. and Britain financed the war and sets Lindberg’s
infamous Des Moines speech in 1940, instead of 1941. Notwithstanding these
qualms, Moore offers us an easy way to understand some of the history of World
War II and the economics behind it and it highlights the career of the hitherto
anonymous Ansel Luxford who was in the room where much history was made.
For the full Amazon URL see: Economic Warfare (amazon.com)
