Reflections on the Early History of the Bank for International Settlements

Abstract

The Bank for International Settlements (hereafter BIS), one of the oldest existing international organizations, has doubtlessly become a major vehicle for international cooperation among the central banks of the world’s richest countries. From the point of view of our conference, however, the relevant question is whether the BIS has been and still is an effective organization for coordinating international fmancial flows and for helping to prevent systemic breakdown. Answering that question should involve examination of what the BIS contributed to those two tasks but, in addition, an assessment of how its organizational structure (its „architecture”) was and is related to that contribution. In this short statement I focus only on the early history of the BIS, on its founding and performance during the crisis of the early 1930s. Nevertheless, I believe that this early experience does help shed some light on that institution’s subsequent development and policy stance.