Rothschild Banking Family of France - Decline and Rise of Economic Power

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)

    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)

    To business that we love we rise betime,
    And go to’t with delight.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    Until women learn to want economic independence ... and until they work out a way to get this independence without denying themselves the joys of love and motherhood, it seems to me feminism has no roots.
    Crystal Eastman (1881–1928)

    But, with whatever exception, it is still true that tradition characterizes the preaching of this country; that it comes out of the memory, and not out of the soul; that it aims at what is usual, and not at what is necessary and eternal; that thus historical Christianity destroys the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the exploration of the moral nature of man; where the sublime is, where are the resources of astonishment and power.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)