Decline and Rise of Economic Power
By the end of the 19th century, the introduction of national taxation systems had ended the Rothschild's policy of operating with a single set of commercial account records resulting in the various houses gradually going their own separate ways. The system of the five brothers and their successor sons had all but disappeared by World War I. However, the estate tax relative to the bank and corporate assets was far more detrimental long-term because it restricted growth at a time when publicly owned banks were expanding rapidly with huge resources raised on capital markets. In the 1930s, their vast railroad holdings were nationalized and in 1940 the Nazis seized their bank. Then, after having the bank restored to them at the end of the war, in 1981 the bank Rothschild Freres was nationalized by the French socialist government of President François Mitterrand. The New York Times wrote that the Rothschilds "grossly misjudged the opportunities directly across the Atlantic" and quoted Evelyn Robert de Rothschild as saying that while the family had been in business for 200 years "we never seized the initiative in America and that was one of the mistakes my family made."
Read more about this topic: Rothschild Banking Family Of France
Famous quotes containing the words decline and, decline, rise, economic and/or power:
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“The American suffrage movement has been, until very recently, altogether a parlor affair, absolutely detached from the economic needs of the people.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)