Joseph Dodge

Joseph Dodge and Ikeda Hayato 1949

Joseph Dodge , full name Joseph Morrell Dodge , ( November 18, 1890 - December 2, 1964 ) was an American banker and government employee.

Dodge was born in Detroit to an artist and member of the Quakers . His childhood was marked by poverty and he did not attend college . From 1917 to 1932 he worked for the auto supplier Thomas J. Doyle Company and then for the Bank of Detroit , of which he became president in 1933. In 1941 he became director of a division of the Army Service Forces; In 1942 he entered the service of the American government directly as the commissioner for price control of armaments. He headed several agencies involved in this task until he became financial advisor to the American military administration in Berlin in 1945 and later became financial director of the American armed forces in Germany. In 1946 he was awarded the Medal of Merit .

To remedy the German economic problems after the end of the war in 1945, he proposed a 90 percent devaluation of the Reichsmark and a levy on property. Together with the German emigrants Gerhard Colm and Raymond W. Goldsmith, he developed a plan to reorganize the German banking and central banking system (also known as the Dodge Plan for short), which provided for a separate central bank for each country without the right to issue notes. The coordination should take place via an allied banking authority (Allied Banking Board) and a commission of the central banks in the countries (Land Central Bank Commission). In line with the US Federal Reserve System, the Landesbanken should be independent of government influence. In application of his plan, the Landesbanken were created first in the American zone, then in the bizone . From them the Bank Deutscher Land emerged, which with the "Law for the Reorganization of the Monetary System" of June 19, 1948 also received the right to issue banknotes and coins, which was a prerequisite for the 1948 currency reform.

In 1947, Dodge took part in negotiations for a post-war treaty for Austria as a financial expert and from 1949 worked for General MacArthur in the same capacity in Japan. In 1952, President Eisenhower appointed him director of the Office of Management and Budget , a position of cabinet rank which he held until 1954. He died in Detroit in 1964.

Dodge was married and had a son.

Sources and web links

• Short biography in Social Networks and Archival Context , University of Virginia
• Obituary in the New York Times, December 3, 1964

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary in the New York Times, December 3, 1964
2. ^ Landeszentralbank im Freistaat Bayern, Head Office of the Deutsche Bundesbank , Manfred Steiner, published on March 27, 2012; in: Historical Lexicon of Bavaria