Segunda Guerra Mundial: como os EUA e o Japao foram a guerra - Book review NYT

The March to War

‘No End Save Victory’ and ‘Japan 1941’

By MICHAEL BESCHLOSSMAY 15, 2014

In February 1933, President-elect Franklin Roosevelt was nearly murdered in Miami by a gunman whose errant fatal shot struck Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago. Cermak gallantly told Roosevelt, “I’m glad it was me instead of you.” Today’s Americans should not disagree. Had Roosevelt been killed, the 32nd president of the United States would have been his running mate, Speaker John Nance Garner of Texas, a neophyte in foreign and military affairs, isolationist by instinct and deeply rooted in a Congress determined, notwithstanding the growing threats from Hitler and the imperial Japanese, to keep another president from repeating what a majority of its members considered to be Woodrow Wilson’s catastrophic mistake of needlessly dragging the nation into a distant “foreign war.”

Photoshopping Roosevelt out of the history of that epoch shows how lucky we are that he indeed survived to be our president, preparing America to fight and help win World War II. So does “No End Save Victory,” David Kaiser’s judicious, detailed and soundly researched history of Roosevelt’s tortuous process of first preparing America psychologically, politically and militarily, and then nudging the country into that apocalyptic struggle. This story has, of course, been told many times before, but what Kaiser especially brings to the table is his mastery not only of the documents and other primary sources that directly reveal Roosevelt’s behind-the-scenes leadership but also of other archives that are sometimes too little mined by political historians, like Army and Navy war plans (the author taught history at the Naval War College).

Americans are not immune to the temptation to see historical events as inevitable, which, by logic, reduces the credit we grant to individual leaders like Roose­velt. But Kaiser crisply reminds us how dangerous and unpredictable the period really was, noting Roosevelt’s not inconsiderable private dread that Hitler might well put himself in a position to dominate the world. Cogently deciphering the twists and turns of the president’s thinking, Kaiser argues that his famous 1940 deal to trade United States destroyers for British bases was “a logical step based on current U.S. war plans and the ever-present possibility that Britain might fall and force the United States immediately to defend the Western Hemisphere.” Kaiser considers the first half of 1941 to be the most difficult time for those in Washington to figure out how World War II might unfold, making Roosevelt’s “sensitive and discriminating judgment” more valuable than ever. United States Army intelligence was warning him that unless the still-unprepared America entered the war fast, Britain would enjoy at best a one-in-three chance to survive. As Kaiser writes, Roosevelt behind closed doors seemed less worried about “getting the United States into the war” than “about war coming to the United States before it was ready.” In Kaiser’s judgment, it was June 1941, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, that Roosevelt “evidently decided not only that the United States had to enter the war at a relatively early date, but that it should seek the complete defeat of all its enemies.”

With his respect for the documentary evidence, the author’s literary inclination is to be self-effacing, but while reading this book you might occasionally wish to hear a little more comment from Kaiser. For instance, the author almost offhandedly quotes Roosevelt in November 1941, privately recalling his involvement years before in Harvard’s decision to reduce its share of Jewish students to 15 percent; Kaiser adds no reaction of his own. His book has the effect of refuting the charge that Roosevelt connived for the tragic destruction of American ships at Pearl Harbor in order to shove the nation into a war it would otherwise oppose, but not frontally. If this volume were your only source on the disaster of Dec. 7, 1941, you would not know how many of our fellow citizens (probably a growing number in these times when many people — agitated, in some cases, by talk radio hosts — seek to explain complicated events through malign conspiracies) insist that a warmongering Roosevelt was its eager architect. Nevertheless Kaiser has brought us a careful, nuanced, credible account of the events and complex issues surrounding America’s entry into World War II, which, however historical fashions change, is likely to wear well over the years.

Examining the same period as it looked from the other side of the Pacific, Eri Hotta’s “Japan 1941” seeks to reveal and explain the secret internal mechanics of the Tokyo regime that planned and executed the Pearl Harbor assault. Suffice it to say that Japan’s people were not lucky enough to be led by a Franklin Roosevelt. Instead the Japanese leadership was a sequestered gaggle of blinkered, hallucinatory, buck-passing incompetents, who finally pushed the vacillating Emperor Hirohito into gambling on war against the United States. Hotta, an Oxford-trained Asia specialist, does an effective job of portraying the almost Keystone Kops-style decision-making in Tokyo; the cumulative effect of her narrative is chilling as we watch it march toward global tragedy despite warning after warning.

Hirohito’s navy chief of staff tells him in July 1941 that there might be “no choice but to strike,” although he is “uncertain as to any victory.” The emperor replies, “What a reckless war that would be!” Hirohito complains to his prime minister, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, that he has been “kept in the dark” about advanced military preparations, and ineffectually recites a pacifist poem written by his grandfather: “In all four seas all are brothers and sisters. / Then why, oh why, these rough winds and waves?” Gen. Tojo Hideki, then the Japanese defense minister, is told a potential war is unwinnable, but brazenly scoffs: “This is, after all, a desktop exercise. Actual wars do not go as you fellows imagine.” Hotta acidly remarks: “Was Tojo hoping for the sudden discovery of oil fields in Japan so that his country could forget that the United States had until recently been providing more than 90 percent of its petroleum? . . . Was he anticipating a series of natural disasters to work in the empire’s favor, like the typhoons that had prevented the Moguls from invading Japan in the 13th century?” In September 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor, Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku presents his now well-known caution that “a war with so little chance of success should not be fought.” As Hotta writes, in the end “all the leaders asserted their right to decide Japan’s fate by initiating a war, while paradoxically insinuating that they had no ultimate control over the fate of the country they led.”

Hotta’s argumentation is sound and her message important, but “Japan 1941” falls short of its publisher’s assertion that it is “groundbreaking history, . . . certain to revolutionize how we think of the war in the Pacific.” The volume will no doubt move students of Japan’s machinations before Pearl Harbor to consider modest adjustments in their estimates of certain historical characters and moments. But truly groundbreaking revisionist history requires the kind of major new interpretations and archival discoveries that are scarce in this volume. Furthermore, a book so clearly ambitious to revamp our understanding of a subject so heavily written about as the run-up to the Pacific war would be more persuasive if it had more adequate documentation; this volume offers merely 14 pages of endnotes. However, with those caveats in mind, Hotta’s book remains a useful addition to the vast pre-Pearl Harbor literature. Read at this time of our own dysfunction in Washington, it also constitutes a warning of the literally earth-shattering dangers that can emerge when the political system of a powerful nation fails to work.

NO END SAVE VICTORY

How FDR Led the Nation Into War

By David Kaiser

Illustrated. 408 pp. Basic Books. $27.99.

JAPAN 1941

Countdown to Infamy

By Eri Hotta

Illustrated. 320 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

Michael Beschloss, a contributor to The Upshot on NYTimes.com, is writing a book about presidential leadership in wartime.

A version of this review appears in print on May 18, 2014, on page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The March to War.

Alemanha anos 1920: a loucura da hiperinflacao e outras loucuras - book review

Bad Marks

‘The Downfall of Money,’ by Frederick Taylor

Albert Harlingue/Roger Viollet—Getty Images

German children playing with banknotes that have lost their value through inflation, circa 1919.

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

The New York Times Book Reviews, January 3, 2014

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Frederick Taylor’s “The Downfall of Money” promises, on its jacket, to deliver “an economic horror story.” A horror it was: We’ve all seen the photos from Germany with the wheelbarrows full of cash or the children playfully stacking bricks of worthless bills (by late 1923 the mark had deteriorated from a value of 4.2 to the dollar in 1914 to over 4 trillion). The monetary crisis was so traumatic that to this day, it renders the German people thoroughly allergic to price increases.

THE DOWNFALL OF MONEY

Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class

By Frederick Taylor

Illustrated. 416 pp. Bloomsbury Press. $30.

But despite its title, this book is primarily concerned not with money but with everything else the Germans were also concerned with from 1914 to about 1929: military strategy, starvation, assassinations (of people good and bad), putsches (fruitless and fruitful), foreign occupation, riots, strikes and pretty much every other permutation of anarchy and violence.

For the first 100 pages or so, Taylor, the author of “Dresden” and “The Berlin Wall,” gives us a highly detailed, and somewhat detoured, narrative of the years around World War I. There is little mention of monetary issues, save an occasional reference to the exchange rate. Taylor pays more attention to the economic issues of the 1920s, but even then what he really seems to want to write about is the general craziness that was Weimar Germany.

There is much engrossing craziness to cover. Many readers are no doubt familiar with the Treaty of Versailles’ war-guilt clause, which shifted blame for a pointless, expensive autopilot of a war entirely onto Germany and its allies. Fewer probably remember how that finger-pointing then ricocheted within Germany itself after the Kaiser was ousted and splintered groups of Communists, Social Democrats and far-right nationalists blamed one another for the humiliations of the war and its aftermath. Abused by the vengeful victors, the Germans turned to abusing (and slaughtering) themselves.

To be sure, Germany was not simply a victim deserving of sympathy. Taylor documents its plans to visit crushing indemnities and annexations upon its enemies had it prevailed in the war. Everyone, he argues repeatedly, behaved badly. And almost everyone borrowed way too much to bankroll this bad behavior, counting on the other guy’s losing in order to get back in the black. The United States, the main creditor to the other victors, comes off looking worse than Americans may care to remember. It was Washington’s refusal to forgive the Allies’ war debts, after all, that encouraged Britain and France to tighten the screws on the broke and psychically broken Germany (which was effectively paying French and British debts to the United States indirectly). As a result, Uncle Sam collected the nickname “Uncle Shylock.”

Only toward the end of the book are we introduced to the long-awaited hyperinflation. There Taylor details the less obvious ways in which dizzyingly high prices frayed the social fabric. Women couldn’t marry, for example, because their dowry savings had been inflated away. Lifestyle choices became strangely distorted by price changes; unlike food costs, opera ticket prices remained cheap because they were set by the state, encouraging consumption of entertainment instead of calories. Strikes and riots abounded — including, most memorably, a strike by Reich printing house workers when the government finally got serious about stamping out inflation. (If they weren’t regularly printing money, they were in danger of losing their jobs.)

There are, Taylor suggests, parallels between the profligate German welfare state of the 1920s and Germany’s European Union peers today. But he is frustratingly noncommittal about why the German government pursued the inflationary policies it did — and to what extent they were deliberate or just ad hoc. Uncertainty ruled not only Weimar economic policy, it seems, but also the historians’ assessments that followed.

Catherine Rampell is an economics reporter for The Times.

A version of this review appears in print on January 5, 2014, on page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Bad Marks.

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Progressos economicos e sociais: um livro para os pessimistas - Angus Deaton

A Cockeyed Optimist

Angus Deaton’s ‘Great Escape’

By DAVID LEONHARDT

The New York Times Books Review: December 19, 2013

Economic nostalgia can have a strong appeal, especially following more than five years of a financial crisis and its aftermath. In the United States, people talk longingly of the mid-20th century, when the middle class was growing and upward mobility was the norm. In Europe and Japan, many hark back to the 1980s, before the euro was born and the Japanese bubble burst. Even in China and India, two of the world’s more dynamic economies, some like to celebrate a time when life did not revolve around breakneck growth.

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Matt Dorfman

THE GREAT ESCAPE

Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

By Angus Deaton

Illustrated. 360 pp. Princeton University Press. $29.95.

The biggest accomplishment of Angus Deaton’s “Great Escape” is to bring perspective to all this wistfulness. Deaton, a respected professor of economics at Princeton, does not stint on describing the world’s problems, be they income inequality in rich countries, health problems in China and the United States or H.I.V. in Africa. Large sections of the book revolve around such troubles and potential solutions. Yet Deaton’s central message is deeply positive, almost gloriously so. By the most meaningful measures — how long we live, how healthy and happy we are, how much we know — life has never been better. Just as important, it is continuing to improve.

Deaton is surely aware that many readers will view these claims with skepticism, especially coming from someone whose discipline often seems to elevate money over basic human needs. He addresses this skepticism with both sweeping and granular descriptions of how life has improved. Life expectancy has risen a stunning 50 percent since 1900 and is still rising. Despite the resulting population explosion, the average quality of life has surged. The share of people living on less than $1 a day (in inflation-adjusted terms) has dropped to 14 percent, from 42 percent as recently as 1981. Even as inequality has surged within many countries, global inequality has very likely fallen, thanks largely to the rise of Asia. “Things are getting better,” he writes, “and hugely so.”

Much of the most rapid change, of course, occurred long ago or — for Deaton’s readers in the United States and Europe — is happening far away. In the industrialized world, it can be easy to focus on bad news (like slow-growing wages and rising obesity) and dismiss the latest innovations (say, the newest iPhone) as materialist distractions. But this, too, would be a mistake. The pace of progress may have slowed in the West. For selected groups, on selected measures, progress may even have stalled. For most people, however, it has not stopped.

The digital revolution has allowed people to remain in touch with friends and family who once would have grown distant. The democratization of air travel, for all its indignities, has helped, too. The greatest progress against cancer and heart disease has come in the last 20 to 30 years. And although Deaton does not emphasize it, nearly every form of discrimination has become less common. When people talk gauzily of life in postwar America, they presumably are not referring to the lives of women, African-Americans, gays, lesbians, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Latinos, Asian-Americans or the disabled.

Most of us can find miniature versions of this tale in our families. Deaton’s grandfather returned from World War I to a Scottish mine and rose to become a supervisor. Deaton’s father, despite not graduating from high school, became a civil engineer and lived twice as long as his own father. My own grandfather escaped the Nazis, to New York, but succumbed to cancer as a fairly young man in 1950. Had modern medicine advanced only a few decades more rapidly, my father may well have grown up with a father. In the starkest terms, most of us today have at least one family member or friend who would not be alive absent the innovations of the last several decades.

Perhaps most impressive — and, at the same time, most worrisome — is that progress is by no means inevitable. Humanity has spent most of its history not making progress, with neither life spans nor incomes rising. “For thousands of years,” Deaton writes, “those who were lucky enough to escape death in childhood faced years of grinding poverty.”

“The Great Escape” of Deaton’s title refers to the process that began during the Enlightenment and made progress the norm. Scientists, doctors, businessmen and government officials began to seek truth, rather than obediently accept dogma, and they began to experiment. In Immanuel Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment: “Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding!” The germ theory of disease, public sanitation, the Industrial Revolution and modern democracy soon followed.

Deaton’s writing is unfailingly accessible to the lay reader. At times, he repeats himself (he is definitely not a fan of foreign aid) or delves into technical subjects that will not interest everyone, like the calculation of exchange rates. But readers looking to learn some economics without picking up a textbook may enjoy these tangents. All in all, “The Great Escape” joins “Getting Better” — a 2011 book by Charles Kenny that concentrated on poor countries (and was more positive about foreign aid) — as one of the most succinct guides to conditions in today’s world.

The great, unanswered question is how rapidly the progress will continue. Deaton pronounces himself cautiously optimistic. But he also acknowledges rising threats, global warming being the most obvious of them. Beyond climate change, economic growth has slowed and inequality has risen in most rich countries, leaving the middle class and poor with only modest gains. The skew is so severe in the United States that a vast majority of Americans — the bottom 99 percent, he calculates — have done worse than a vast majority of French in recent decades, despite our reputation for economic dynamism. In China, meanwhile, a growth slowdown may just be beginning, and it could bring true political tumult, including war.

From a historical perspective, the most worrisome development may be the tendency not to heed the central lesson of the Enlightenment and, by extension, of Deaton’s Great Escape: Facts matter, especially when they conflict with dogma and preconceived notions. Pretending otherwise has consequences.

Knowledge — which is to say education — is humanity’s most important engine of improvement. Deaton concludes, based on the data, that rising education is the most powerful cause of the recent longevity boom in most poor countries, even more powerful than high incomes. A typical resident of India is only as rich as a typical Briton in 1860, for example, but has a life expectancy more typical of a European in the mid-20th century. The spread of knowledge, about public health, medicine and diet, explains the difference.

Unfortunately, knowledge and facts are often on the defensive today. Fundamentalists of various stripes keep many countries from completing their own great escape. In the West, science still sometimes yields to dogma, on climate change, on evolution and on economic policy. Elites on both the right and left question the value of education for the masses and oppose attempts to improve schools even as they spend countless hours and dollars pursuing the finest possible education for their own children.

It is true that many of today’s biggest problems, including economic growth, education and climate, defy easy solutions. But the same was true, and much more so, about escaping centuries of poverty and early death. It was hard, and it involved a lot of failure along the way. The story Deaton tells — the most inspiring human story of all — should give all of us reason for optimism, so long as we are willing to listen to its moral.

David Leonhardt, a former economics columnist and Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, is leading a new project for the paper that will focus on politics and policy.

A longa marcha da China para o capitalismo internacional - book review

Ben Wiseman

WEALTH AND POWER

China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century

By Orville Schell and John Delury

Illustrated. 478 pp. Random House. $30.

In “Wealth and Power,” their engaging narrative of the intellectual and cultural origins of China’s modern rise, Orville Schell and John Delury note that the story of Goujian was a favorite of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who united China under his rule before being forced into exile in Taiwan. They might have called it the defining theme of contemporary China. From Wei Yuan in the early 19th century, the first major intellectual to insist that the mighty Chinese Empire had fundamental flaws, to Xi Jinping, who became China’s top leader last year, the humiliations China has suffered at the hands of foreigners over the past century and a half are the glue that keeps the country together.

Many nations revel in their victories. America has its War of Independence. The British still churn out documentaries about World War II. But even $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves has not healed the psychological trauma of 1842, the year of China’s defeat at the hands of the British in the first Opium War. After that conflict, China was dismembered, first by the European powers, then, more devastatingly, by Japan. Chinese troops expelled the Japanese, and the country was reunified more than 60 years ago. But it is determined to keep the memory of the abuses it suffered from fading into history.

Shame often acts as a depressant. But through the 11 biographical sketches that constitute their book, Schell and Delury argue that for generations of influential Chinese, shame has been a stimulant. In one sense, the evidence is not hard to find. The inaugural exhibition at the National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square, splashily reopened in 2011, was called “The Road to Rejuvenation,” which treated the Opium War as the founding event of modern China. And it then told a Disneyesque version of how the Communist Party restored the country’s greatness. At the museum of the Temple of Tranquil Seas in Nanjing, the site of the signing of one of the most unequal of China’s treaties with foreign powers, is inscribed this phrase: “To feel shame is to approach courage.” Humiliation has been a staple of Communist Party propaganda.

Schell, a prolific chronicler of China’s reform-era politics and society, and Delury, an expert on Chinese and North Korean politics, acknowledge the cynicism behind the party’s use of shame as a nationalist rallying cry. But their book makes the case that such feelings represent a deep strain in the Chinese psyche, which the country’s current leaders have inherited as part of their cultural DNA. To love China means to share a passionate commitment to overcoming the loss of face suffered in the 19th century, to ensure that the defeats of the past will never be suffered again.

This is not the first book to explore the legacy of the Opium Wars or the origins of Chinese nationalism. But what it offers readers is the idea that the most important Chinese intellectuals and political leaders, from the Empress Dowager Cixi to Deng Xiaoping, were united in the national quest to avenge humiliation. They all felt shame, and used it as the path to “wealth and power.”

Many of the steps they took were disastrous. Over a century and a half China has stumbled through imperial rule, warlordism, republicanism and Communism. Its leaders have reigned through feudalism, fascism, totalitarianism and capitalism. But for Schell and Delury, none of those conflicting systems or ideologies in the end defined China, or even the leaders who imposed them. Instead, the constant through China’s recent history is the persistent search for something — anything — that would bring restoration.

The reformers of the early 19th century were the first to declare that China was “big and weak,” and though the statement was true, at the time it bordered on heresy. The solution the early reformers proposed was “to self-strengthen,” which would be achieved by adopting selective Western technologies and methods. By the turn of the 20th century, after a series of even more severe setbacks, prescriptions from scholars and advisers grew bolder. Liang Qichao, who founded the Sense of Shame Study Society, felt Chinese culture bred timidity. He wanted to destroy China’s Confucian “core” and rebuild the country from scratch with imported Western ideas.

That was the template China’s Nationalist leaders, Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, followed for years as they struggled to figure out which Western political, cultural and economic formulas could reinvigorate their country. Schell and Delury are more provocative in arguing that Liang’s ideas of “creative destruction” also led, in a more or less straight line, to Mao Zedong.

Much of Mao’s brutally destructive legacy — the mass killings of class enemies, the famine-inducing Great Leap Forward, the catastrophic Cultural Revolution — should be viewed, they suggest, less through the prism of radical Marxism than as an attempt to exorcise Confucian passivity. Mao especially wanted to eliminate the traditional ideal of “harmony” and replace it with a mandate to pursue “permanent revolution,” an inversion of Chinese cultural traditions he believed essential to unleashing the country’s productive forces.

Schell and Delury do not say that Mao intended to pave the way for Deng and his acolytes, including Zhu Rongji, whom they present as the most successful implementer of Deng’s ideas. But they do seek to show that Deng’s pursuit of market-oriented reforms might well have met far more resistance if Mao had not bequeathed him a blank slate — that is, a ruling party exhausted by bloody campaigns and a people purged of their ancient notions of order. Deng’s tactics may have been the polar opposite of Mao’s, but their goals, realized partly under Deng and rather spectacularly by his successors, were precisely the same.

Despite the book’s title, this is not a definitive guide to China’s rise. Schell and Delury devote only a few pages to economics, the core of most other big works on China’s emergence as a great power. But their examination of how an unusual trait in Chinese culture worked its way through politics and intellectual life is a fascinating attempt to reconcile China’s current success with its past suffering. It also sets the stage for perhaps the biggest challenge facing a much wealthier and more powerful China today, since it cannot go on fighting its vanquished ghosts forever.

Joseph Kahn is the foreign editor and a former Beijing bureau chief of The Times.

A version of this review appeared in print on July 21, 2013, on page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Losing Face, Leaping Forward.

Banco de Compensacoes, da Basileia: uma entidade secreta? - book review

They’ve Got a Secret

‘Tower of Basel,’ by Adam LeBor

Erik T. Johnson

By MICHAEL HIRSH

Published: July 19, 2013

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Adam LeBor’s history of the Bank for International Settlements, “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 LeBor’s telling, the B.I.S., 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 center of a global network of money, power and covert global influence.”

TOWER OF BASEL

The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World

By Adam LeBor

Illustrated. 323 pp. PublicAffairs. $28.99.

The B.I.S. 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 B.I.S. is less “the secret bank that runs the world,” as 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 B.I.S. 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 LeBor, a journalist based in Budapest, does a creditable job in this well-researched account. The B.I.S. offers up a lesson in the amorality of finance and the need for greater accountability in international capital flows — a lesson that surely resonates in an era when Wall Street executives have avoided culpability for their role in the subprime securitization scam.

Born in secrecy in 1930, the B.I.S. 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,” 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 outmaneuvering 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 B.I.S.’s 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. As detailed in previous books, like Charles Higham’s “Trading With the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949”(1983), the B.I.S.’s 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 B.I.S. 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,” LeBor writes. McKittrick, seemingly untroubled by his role as “Hitler’s American banker,” as LeBor describes him, moved on to become vice president of Chase National Bank after the war.

The B.I.S.’s morally tainted wartime experience almost sank it at the 1944 conference at Bretton Woods, N.H., 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 B.I.S.’s powerful friends, including John Maynard Keynes, intervened to save it.

Designed to buy and sell gold and foreign exchange for its clients and provide short-term credit and asset management to central banks (though it is no longer needed for that), the B.I.S. has somehow managed to survive its own checkered history as well as the disappearance of the other two main reasons for its existence: war reparations and the maintenance of the gold standard imposed at Bretton Woods. From the 1960s on, it helped to lay the groundwork for the European Monetary Union, although it was quickly eclipsed in importance by the European Monetary Institute and then the European Central Bank.

Today the B.I.S. 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 B.I.S.’s 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. The B.I.S. was one of the few financial institutions to warn repeatedly of runaway growth in the years leading up to the crash of 2008. Yet as LeBor concedes, “knowing there was a problem, however, did not mean the bank could always persuade policy makers to take preventative or remedial measures.” In fact, it has had little sway, and it is only as the host bank for the Basel committee, which is run by the heads of the national central banks, that the B.I.S. can lay claim to any influence.

Even now, the B.I.S. 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, many critics say, too mild in its prescriptions. Yet the B.I.S. lives on as enduring proof that while it’s often easy to create international institutions, it’s very hard to get rid of them. “The B.I.S. progresses through the 21st century with ever more confidence,” LeBor concludes, “even though there is no need for it to exist.”

Michael Hirsh is the chief correspondent for National Journal and the author of “Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street.”

A version of this review appeared in print on July 21, 2013, on page BR17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: They’ve Got a Secret.

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