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:
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“We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall—which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
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