One Summer: America, 1927

of them later serving as governor.
    Norman himself showed no particular promise as a young man. He worked capably enough in the family bank, but took long periods off for travel and nervous collapses. During his longest stretch of healthfulness, he spent four years with a merchant bank in New York. During the Boer War he enlisted as a captain in the British Army and, to the presumed astonishment of everyone who knew him, served so gallantly that he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, the highest honour available to an officer (but then collapsed, predictably, in ill health). In 1915, at theadvanced age of forty-four, Norman joined the Bank of England, and so impressed people with his fierce intellect and command of detail that within five years he was governor.
    It would be safe to say that the Bank of England has never had a more erratic leader. Often, when feeling low, he took abrupt and lengthy leaves of absence – once for three months to South Africa – without explanation or farewell, leaving his subordinates to conduct the bank’s affairs as they supposed he would were he there. At other times he vanished with his mother to Switzerland or France to attend one of the many clinics run by a small but charismatic Frenchman named Émile Coué. A pharmacist in Nancy, Coué became enormously popular in the 1920s through inventing a method of self-improvement that he called autosuggestion. Coué’s system, which he explained in a slim best-selling book called Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion , was based on the simple idea of thinking of oneself in exclusively positive terms and of repeating over and over the simple mantra ‘Every day in every way I am getting better and better.’ fn1
    Coué’s book was just ninety-two pages long and the larger part of that was taken up with testimonials from his admiring clients. Followers of Coué’s technique – who eventually numbered in the millions – credited the great man with curing almost any malady you could name: Bright’s disease, sinusitis, neurasthenia, brain tumours, even nymphomania and club foot. One ecstatic client professed to have overcome a lifelong difficulty in digesting strawberries. Another joyously renounced kleptomania. By the mid-1920s, Coué had clinics all over Europe and North America.
    Unfortunately, in the summer of 1926 the little Frenchman dropped dead of a heart attack, which rather underscored the point that positive thinking, however diligently applied, could take oneonly so far. The movement lost its momentum and Norman returned to a state of chronic hypochondria, where he seemed more comfortable anyway. When not practising Couéism, Norman was also a committed dabbler in spiritualism and the occult. He once claimed to a colleague that he could walk through walls. Perversely, all this merely enhanced his reputation for financial wizardry.
    The third member of the group was Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, president of Germany’s Reichsbank, who owed his memorable name to the fact that his father had resided for some years in America as a young man and had there developed an admiration for the crusading newspaperman Horace Greeley. Hjalmar Schacht later became a slavish supporter of Adolf Hitler (even going so far as to adopt a comical postage-stamp moustache in the Hitlerian mode) and minister of economics under the Nazis. In the words of one observer, ‘Dr Schacht conferred legitimacy on Hitler’s thugs.’
    In 1927, he was a national hero, credited with bringing Germany through its greatest economic crisis. Four years earlier, in January 1923, the French, exasperated with Germany’s failure to keep up with reparation payments, had seized the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. The result was dizzying hyperinflation. The mark, which had traded at about four to the dollar before the war, now shot up to 600,000 to the dollar. By summer, the exchange rate was 630 billion marks to the dollar and inflation was so rampant that prices were doubling daily, sometimes hourly. People needed wheelbarrows or prams to carry enough paper money to conduct even the simplest transactions. Sending a letter cost 10 billion marks. A streetcar ride that had cost 1 mark in 1914 now cost 15 billion. Pensions became worthless. People found that savings carefully built up over a lifetime now wouldn’t buy a cup of coffee. Eventually, at the peak of the madness, prices rose to 1,422,900,000,000 times their levels of ten years