Ebook: The Greek foreign debt and the great powers, 1821-1898

This scholarly work depicts the struggles of three generations of Greek financiers, from the outbreak of the seven-year War of Independence almost to the start of this century. It is admirably documented and indexed. Further, its succinct but vivid and warmly human style makes it readable, even for persons concerned neither with Greece nor with international finance.

That there is so little of it is the sole defect of this history, in the reviewer’s eyes. It stops about where one must begin, to learn something of Greece’s grave problems in public finance after the present war. It should have been brought down to, say, 1940-even at the cost of neglecting bygone generations when Greece was a mere principality.

Levandis’ cold facts are a shocking tale of skulduggery, by no means one-sided. British or French underwriters repeatedly bamboozled their clients with fraudulent bond prospectuses and then scalped the Greek Treasury with bond contracts so extortionate sometimes as to make of Greece the nominal destination of its borrowings.

The record of New York underwriters during their bond-selling orgy of the recent twenties is no blacker, if as black. At points where he well can, Levandis usually defends Greek probity in negotiating foreign loans and in spending their proceeds. At one point, though, he misses an opportunity (p. 16). Shortly after Greece raised .£348,000 at London in 1824, an observer in Greece reported as follows:

"Phanariots and doctors of medicine, who in the month of April, 1824, were clad in ragged coats and who lived on scanty rations, threw off the patriotic chrysalis before summer was past and emerged in all the splendor of brigand life, fluttering about in rich Albanian habiliments, refulgent with brilliant unused arms, and followed by diminutive pipe bearers and tall henchmen."

Strangers to the workings of international credit will see behind that conspicuous consumption a mob of rapscallion public employees, each getting a cash handout-from the Treasury. Well, in the recent twenties, America once lent less than a hundred million dollars to Poland- "one of the five Great Powers," a bond prospectus said, but anyhow no principality. In three months savings deposits in Poland doubled, and in six months they trebled; then, of course, came the crash. Colombia, a lesser nation, went the same way. That "brigand splendor" of revolutionary Greece blossomed probably not from embezzlement but from honest inflation.

RAY OVID HALL