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)
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Compassion brings us to a stop, and for a moment we rise above ourselves.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up—or else all go down—as one people.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Power, I said. Power to walk into the gold vaults of the nations, into the secrets of kings, into the holy of holies. Power to make multitudes run squealing in terror at the touch of my little invisible finger. Even the moon’s frightened of me. Frightened to death. The whole world’s frightened to death.”
—R.C. Sherriff (1896–1975)