The economic advisers of the 1924 Dawes Committee enacted currency and banking reforms as a means of resolving financial and geopolitical problems. Although the committee members stated that they had no plans to resolve the Ruhr occupation, evidence from the technical advisers demonstrated the opposite. Economists Edwin Kemmerer, Joseph Davis and Arthur Young sought to appease Franco-Belgian demands for a resolution to the reparations debate by balancing the German budget and reorganising the banking system, thereby also addressing the question of military occupation. This research delves into the advisers’ reports on public finance, currency stabilisation and the gold standard, arguing that their attempts to assuage reparation-related concerns rested on major reforms to German central banking.

This research examines the central banks of interwar Europe through the lens of statistics. It focuses particularly on how the rise of economic and statistical expertise simultaneously supported the existing goals of central banks to retain national autonomy and the tenets of liberal internationalism espoused by the League of Nations. The institutionalised efforts to improve quantitative research culminated in the 1928 Conference of Central Bank Statisticians, where delegates envisioned creating new channels of cooperation based on standardised terminology and a centralised information bureau. By framing central banks within the historiographies of statistics and interwar internationalism, this article details the confluence of factors that shaped a new dependence on expertise.

This article examines debates over banking regulation in Germany that culminated in the 1934 Reich Banking Law. Existing accounts have traced its origins to the 1931 banking crisis or the 1933 Nazi seizure of power. Yet, rather than the outcome of a single financial or political crisis, banking regulation was the product of longer-term discussions on national security, legal rationale, and financial globalization. Prior to World War I, officials expressed concerns over Germany's dependence on foreign capital, while later efforts to improve liquidity in the banking sector continued in the 1920s. The construction of a regulatory policy thus arose from a series of investigations into how to protect the German economy from foreign crises, thereby reflecting the interdependence of politics and finance.