The creation of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in 1929 to deal with the settlement of First World War reparations payments was seen by central banks as an opportunity to put international cooperation on an institutional footing. Their initial vision of what the BIS might achieve in support of the gold exchange standard was ambitious. In the view of Montagu Norman and Hjalmar Schacht, the BIS needed to become a forum not merely for information exchange and for refining the techniques of managing the gold exchange standard, but a truly cooperative organisation capable of providing support to central banks in emergencies and for developing new financial arrangements. This chapter investigates the scope of the Norman-Schacht vision, as well as attempts to put this vision into practice (e.g. through the BIS study committee on medium-term credits, or through the BIS-coordinated interventions in the Austrian banking and financial crisis of May-June 1931). Based on research in the historical archives of the BIS, this chapter assesses whether the Norman-Schacht vision for the BIS failed because of differences in policies and goals among the central banks, or rather because of the disruptive effects of the Great Depression.

This chapter examines some distinctive ideas about economic regionalism that emerged during the interwar years and the early 1940s. Some arose in the context of Japanese debates about a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity, of which the most sophisticated was Akamatsu Kaname’s “Wild Geese Flying Pattern theory” of regional economic integration. Others were associated with post-1933 German designs for Europe’s economy, including “Schachtian” managed bilateralism (Hjalmar Schacht), fascist multilateralism (Walter Funk), and visions of a “great-space economy” (Friedrich Zimmermann). The final example comes from Peru’s Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre who advanced a quite different anti-imperialist vision of regionalism initially through what he called “Indoamerican economic nationalism” within Latin America and then via a wider vision of “democratic Interamericanism without empire” that was inclusive of the United States.