“The new Jewish state in Palestine will look to America to supply it not only with additional capital, but also with techniques, industrial skills, and machinery,” Mayor Israel Rokach of Tel Aviv last night told a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, attended by more than 200 industrialists, bankers, professional and business men, The dinner was arranged by the American office of the Karen Hayesod.
“Palestine needs so much to create a balanced economy, to absorb the hundreds of thousands of now immigrants in the next years,” said Mayor Israel Rokach, “that it is impossible to give anything but an overall picture of her immediate economic requirements. However, the first thing that comes to mind is housing. The scale of such a project is so vast that the new State must sock substantial aid in this direction. One of the requisites is the possibility of obtaining long term capital at low interest rates, and for this, existing Palestine banking institutions and now instruments to be created, must have substantially larger funds at their disposal.”
Mayer Rokach also pointed out the fact that no American bank has branch offices in Palestine or any other country of the Middle East and stated that in his opinion, American bankers were not taking full advantage of important business. At the present time banking is handled principally by British interests in this whole area.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
