30 Facts About Lauchlin Currie

Lauchlin Bernard Currie was a Canadian economist best known for being President Franklin Roosevelt's chief economic advisor during World War II.

Lauchlin Currie was never charged with a crime related to espionage or security violations, and debate remains around if he knowingly collaborated with agents of the Soviet Union.

Lauchlin Currie had begun to demonstrate studious habits by the time his family moved to Massachusetts, but he drove automobiles "with his foot on the floor board" for relaxation.

Lauchlin Currie attended school in California, where he had relatives.

From 1920 to 1922, Lauchlin Currie attended St Francis Xavier University before transferring to the London School of Economics to study under Edwin Cannan, Hugh Dalton, Arthur Lyon Bowley, and Harold Laski.

In 1934, Lauchlin Currie constructed the first money supply and income velocity series for the United States.

Lauchlin Currie blamed the government's "commercial loan theory" of banking for monetary tightening in mid-1929, when the economy was already declining, and then for its passivity during the next four years in the face of mass liquidations and bank failures.

Lauchlin Currie cited his colleague and covert Soviet agent Abraham George Silverman for his "many helpful suggestions and criticisms" in the formation of this line of thinking.

In 1934, Lauchlin Currie became a naturalized US citizen and joined Jacob Viner's "freshman brain trust" at the Treasury Department, where he outlined an ideal monetary system for the US that included a 100-percent reserve banking plan to strengthen central bank control and prevent bank panics in the future by preventing member banks from lending out their demand deposit liabilities, while removing reserve requirements on savings deposits with low turnover.

Lauchlin Currie constructed a "net federal income-creating expenditure series" to show the strategic role of fiscal policy in complementing monetary policy to revive an economy in exceptionally acute, persisting depression.

Lauchlin Currie's preferred 100-percent reserve banking idea was not one of the reforms implemented.

Lauchlin Currie was appointed special advisor on economic affairs to the White House in July 1939 and gave counsel on taxation, social security, and the speeding up of peacetime and wartime production plans until the end of the Roosevelt administration.

Lauchlin Currie was assigned to expedite the Flying Tigers, a voluntary unit of American military pilots released for combat duty on behalf of China against Japan and technically part of the Chinese Air Force under the command of Claire Lee Chennault.

Lauchlin Currie returned to Chongqing in July 1942 to try to ease strained relations between Chiang Kai-shek and General Joseph Stilwell, commander of American military forces in China.

Lauchlin Currie was one of several presidential envoys who recommended Stilwell's recall, but General Marshall refused to do so until October 1944.

Lauchlin Currie appears to have been involved in carrying out orders from President Roosevelt to get American intelligence services to return Soviet cryptographic documents and cease decoding operations, so as not to upset a wartime ally.

From 1943 to 1944, Lauchlin Currie served as Deputy Chief of the Foreign Economic Administration, where he recruited or recommended economists and others throughout the federal sector.

Lauchlin Currie was a founding member of the War Agencies Employees Protective Association while at the FEA and served as WAEPA's first president from May 1943 until his retirement in June 1945.

From 1944 to 1945, Lauchlin Currie was involved in loan negotiations between the US and its British and Soviet allies and in preparations for the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In early 1945, Lauchlin Currie headed a tripartite mission to Bern to persuade the Swiss government to freeze Nazi bank accounts and stop further shipments of German supplies through Switzerland to the Italian front.

Lauchlin Currie allegedly informed Soviet contacts in the spring of 1944 that the Venona project was about to break the Soviet signals code, and he was one of those blamed after the war for losing China to the control of Communists.

White and Lauchlin Currie responded by asking to appear before the committee to rebut her charges, and did so later that month.

When Lauchlin Currie tried to renew his US passport in 1954, he was refused on the grounds that he was now residing abroad and married to a Colombian woman.

Lauchlin Currie appears in these cables under the codename "PAGE" and in Soviet intelligence archives as "VIM".

Historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Allen Weinstein, and Christopher Andrew have concluded that Lauchlin Currie knew that he was a Soviet asset.

Currie's biographer Roger J Sandilands has agreed that Currie knew or was connected to individuals who turned out to be Soviet agents or their unwitting assets, but he has disagreed that the evidence is clear that Currie was himself an agent.

Between 1967 and 1971, Lauchlin Currie traveled abroad as a visiting professor at American, Canadian, and British universities: Michigan State University, Simon Fraser University, the University of Glasgow, and the University of Oxford.

Lauchlin Currie returned permanently to Colombia in May 1971 at the behest of President Misael Pastrana Borrero to be the architect of a new "Plan of the Four Strategies" with a focus on urban housing and export diversification.

From 1971 to 1981, Lauchlin Currie was chief economist at the National Planning Department, followed by 12 years at the Institute of Savings and Housing until his death in 1993.

Lauchlin Currie was a professor at the National University of Colombia, Javeriana University, and the University of the Andes.