Oil and the New World Order of Bretton Woods
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Bank & Trust merged with the Corn Exchange Bank and the New York Trust Co. to form New York’s third largest bank group, Chemical Bank New York Trust, also tied to Standard Oil. J.P. Morgan & Co. merged in the same period with Guaranty Trust Co. to form Morgan Guaranty Trust Co., the fifth largest bank. The net effect of this postwar cartelisation of American banking and financial power into the tiny handful of banks in New York, which were strongly oriented towards the fortunes of the international petroleum markets and policy, had enormous consequence for the following three decades of American financial history, overshadowing all other policy influences in U.S. and international policy, with the possible exception of the Vietnam war deficit financing. The New York banks had traditionally been oriented towards international business, but they now held disproportionate power over world finance, as never before. Their power resembled that of the old London imperial banking groups such as Midland Bank, Barclays, and the like. By 1961, the deposits concentrated into the five largest New York banks were fully 75 per cent of all bank deposits of the entire metropolitan region, America’s largest economic region.4 The membership of the increasingly influentiual New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) during the 1950s, also reflected this concentration of financial and economic power. The CFR chairman was the Wall Street lawyer John J. McCloy, also chairman of Chase Bank and a former lawyer for the Rockefeller Standard Oil interests. While most Americans only dimly realized the ominous implications of the concentration of economic and financial power into a small number of hands in New York banks, corporations and related law firms during the early postwar years in the 1950s, the point was not lost on their British cousins in the City of London. American society was increasingly being reshaped along the lines of the British ‘informal empire,’ with finance, raw materials control, and control of international terms of trade as its underpinning, rather than the traditional American foundation of technological and industrial progress. MOHAMMED MOSSADEGH TAKES ON ANGLO-AMERICAN OIL While Britain during the 1950s appeared to be losing her most extensive attributes of empire, she held tenaciously to a reordered set of colonial priorities. Rather than stake everything on maintaining the extensive formal empire reaching to India, she regrouped around
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