David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…A country can’t just have banking as an industry. It needs a real economy to build banking on top of. Exactly. You start with jewelry, watches, then you get into banking. Cuno Korten is actually a major player in the watch trade. Now, they’re not watch makers, they’re watch exporters. They are facilitating the trade of all these best-in-the-world Swiss watches out of Switzerland and into other countries around the world. At this time—this is the late 1890s—Cuno is doing about a million Swiss Francs worth of business a year. Now, I don’t know exactly what the Swiss Franc to US Dollar exchange rate was at 1900, but today the Swiss Franc is stronger than the dollar. It’s about 1:1. They’re pretty close.…

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