2023-04-28 17:20:03
ZBetween the beginning and the middle of April there were incessant purchases of foreign currency, far exceeding the usual current needs of the economy and endangering almost the duration of the defense against the Ruhr. They and their origins – partly the money-filled West, partly large industrial offices, partly importers – very soon attracted general attention and gradually influenced the entire market mood in such a way that, in view of the rush of buyers rushing after them as if on a signal, the Reichsbank, the sole Seller, on April 18, simply had to let the course “jump” with the sharpest repartition. Someone had also taken round amounts from bankers who believed in stability on the previous evenings, which they bought again at a higher price on April 18 and 19; this by the way. An article in the trading section of the “Frankfurter Zeitung” on April 21 attempted to pinpoint various places from where the enormous tension in foreign exchange transactions was directly and indirectly aggravated, either unjustly or clumsily, in any case with a weak sense of responsibility . The article says the following sentence:
“… it is claimed that just last week, outside of trading hours, i.e. outside the dampening control of the Reichsbank, a particularly important industrial administration center was polling for considerable amounts of sterling in Berlin and thereby made the whole market mood what it was gradually until yesterday was. If this is confirmed and if there are not very urgent reasons for the purchase that can be described as legitimate from the public point of view, one would have to ask whether those transactions were influenced too much by the idea that higher exchange rates would stimulate industrial sales, lower it too long.”
Part of the political press, led by the “Vorwaerts”, took up this passage and drew political conclusions from it, but otherwise corrected it on April 22 to state that the industrial administration in question belongs to the Stinnes group and that its foreign exchange demand amounted to several million gold marks. In the meantime, an allegedly “high-ranking personal representative” of Hugo Stinnes has been enabled by the Berlin correspondent of the “New York Herald” to declare that Stinnes has actually made large foreign exchange purchases. On the other hand, all the rumors that these purchases were made after the stock market closed “to drive the mark down” are incorrect. Stinnes did not intend to sell marks if the Reichsbank’s activities to stabilize the mark were interrupted as a result of the stock market close.
We only have to say that the confirmation of the Stinnes administrative body does not seem to match the intentions of its boss: Stinnes’sche G. mbH actually has around 100,000 pounds sterling late in the afternoon, 9.5 billion at the time Mark, who tried hard to buy them, certainly got most of them in individual items in the years that followed, some of them ultimately through the stock exchange. Stinnes himself now believes – and this is quite significant – “that he owes no one an account of his private actions, and that he is relieved of the need to go into street talk and stock market murmurs”. He doesn’t know that his gigantic complex is a public factor, his actions, his loud tendency is a public matter, just as or even more so than everyone’s foreign exchange transactions are subject to official screening according to Reich decrees today, which is especially true at the time of the Ruhr defense must.
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