5 - From OMGUS to Civil Service in Washington, DC and for Europe 1948–1953

Summary

Tenenbaum and his family returned from Berlin to Washington DC in September 1948. In October, he started working for the European Recovery Administration (ECA). His friend Charles P. Kindleberger had been the head of the German desk within the State Department to which ECA was attached. But Kindleberger had just left to assume his professorship of economics at MIT. At ECA Tenenbaum was employed as “Assistant Chief (Finance) of the European Trade Policy Branch,” which was part of the Fiscal and Trade Policy Division, of which he finally became Director. He mainly worked on plans for the founding of the European Payments Union in 1950 and on European trade liberalization and market integration. For almost a year, 1950–51, he worked for the IMF on Multiple Currency Practices in the Exchange Restrictions Department. In May 1951, he went back to ECA, which a few months later merged into the MSA. Here he worked on Greek fiscal and currency problems as well as on plans for a currency reform, hopefully as successful in stopping inflation as the West German one. But Greece, in contrast to the German situation in 1948, had its own government and strong interest groups. Therefore, this one of Tenenbaum’s missions failed. This chapter contains reliable annual-income data for his jobs in Berlin and in Washington DC.