Coming of Age
by Desmond MacRae
Reprinted by permission from
Global Guardian, June 1990
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The Rockefeller factor
The founding impetus for the Group of Thirty came from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. Early in 1978, Deagle came to the foundation as a deputy director, and he later became its director of international relations. The foundation was keenly interested in a program to foster international economic policy. Robert Roosa, a US Treasury undersecretary and foundation board member, was pressing to develop a strategy for making contributions to international economics. So Deagle scheduled a half-day seminar in New York for the early spring of 1978 and drafted Roosa to chair it. "I didn't know who to invite," Deagle laughs. "So I just sort of called around and got people." Some were academics and some were bankers like Geoffrey Bell, now secretary of the Group. A central banker, Paul Volcker, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a Rockefeller Foundation board member, also attended.
Mention was made at the seminar of the now-defunct Bellagio Group, a prototype for what was to become the Group of Thirty. Roosa had, in fact, been a member of the Bellagio Group." Another idea for a group was the Trilateral Commission," recalls Michiya
Matsukawa, a senior executive at Nikko Securities and one of the Group of Thirty's original members. "But this was made of three groups of 100 people each, from three industrially developed parts of the world. A smaller, single group, with people from all over the world, was a more workable idea."
Bell vividly remembers "...the Saturday morning the Rockefeller Foundation invited a group of people to submit their ideas about how they could make a contribution." He says that soon after the meeting, John Knowles, the president of the Foundation, and Roosa came to him and asked him to "construct a feasibility study for putting this into effect."
Bell's suggestions had also impressed Deagle. Right after the meeting, Deagle wrote a memorandum to Knowles suggesting that they form a senior group of people, experienced in international economic policy that could cross a series of conceptual, political and geographic boundaries. One was the boundary between public and private enterprise. "We wanted people who were bankers as well as economic ministers," recalls Deagle. Another was the boundary between present and future problems. "We wanted members who could anticipate problems that might emerge, even if they didn't seem very important right now," he says. "For example, I wanted to have someone from Eastern Europe" (he got central banker Janos Fekete, who was deputy head of the National Bank of Hungary, a man of great charm whom Bell described as "everybody's favorite communist"). Deagle estimated this could be done with 20 people.
So Bell was called to explore the idea of a group of 20. He and Deagle would spend the next three to four months testing the idea by asking prominent people, who might themselves be candidates for membership, whether the idea was sound.
The gregarious and well-connected Bell was a natural choice for a consultant. He had done consulting work for Roosa and knew many central bankers, including Volcker. And Bell's ideas were similar to Deagle's; they both wanted to bring international economics and finance together. "It wasn't very original, although at the time it may have seemed to be a bit different," Bell recalls. Bell thought central bankers could be more useful than ministers of finance who were more politically oriented, and who changed more frequently.
"We went for the professional officials," Bell says. He wanted to bring in bankers who understood the developing international money and capital markets which were having a major impact on interest rates and exchange rates. "These markets were making the floating exchange rate system work very differently from the way officials and academics thought they should work."
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