The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

Finance Should Serve Industry
Many problems arise today when, as Ford puts it, the financial sector 
becomes the master of industry as opposed to its servant.
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If the present faulty system is more profitable to a financier than a more 
perfect system would be, and if that financier values his few remaining years 
of personal profits more highly than he would value the honour of making a 
contribution to the life of the world by helping to erect a better system, then 
there is no way of preventing a clash of interests. But it is fair to say to the self-
ish financial interests that, if their fight is waged to perpetuate a system just 
because it profits them, then their fight is already lost. Why should finance 
fear? The world will still be here. Men will do business with one another. 
There will be money and there will be need of masters of the mechanism of 
money. Nothing is going to depart but the knots and tangles. There will be 
some readjustments, of course. Banks will no longer be the masters of indus-
try. They will be the servants of industry. Business will control money instead 
of money controlling business. The ruinous interest system will be greatly 
modified. Banking will not be a risk, but a service. Banks will begin to do 
much more for the people than they do now, and instead of being the most 
expensive businesses in the world to manage, and the most highly profitable 
in the matter of dividends, they will become less costly, and the profits of their 
operation will go to the community which they serve.

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Money: Master or Servant?  •  165
Two facts of the old order are fundamental. First: that within the nation 
itself the tendency of financial control is toward its largest centralized bank-
ing institutions—either a government bank or a closely allied group of pri-
vate financiers. There is always in every nation a definite control of credit by 
private or semi-public interests. Second: in the world as a whole the same cen-
tralizing tendency is operative. An American credit is under control of New 
York interests, as before the war world credit was controlled in London—the 
British pound sterling was the standard of exchange for the world’s trade.
Two methods of reform are open to us, one beginning at the bottom and 
one beginning at the top. The latter is the more orderly way, the former is 
being tried in Russia. If our reform should begin at the top it will require a 
social vision and an altruistic fervour of a sincerity and intensity which is 
wholly inconsistent with selfish shrewdness.