"BIS was created by Bank of England chairman Montagu Norman in collaboration with Schacht; the first, tumultuous meetings that finally gave the BIS its formal blessing involved American financier Charles G. Dawes and American industrialist Owen D. Young. Dawes was chairman of the board of City National Bank and Trust of Chicago, and had been a director of the US Bureau of the Budget, involved with German reparations arrangements after World War One. Young was the founder of the RCA Corporation and chairman of General Electric. The idea was to create a kind of clearinghouse for the funds. The Germany would pay (to the tune of over 130 million gold marks per year, as per the Versailles Treaty, a sum that increased to more than 500 million marks per year as the discussions evolved) as reparations to those countries that had lost blood and treasure in the war. BIS would be 'the central banker's central bank,' a kind of super-bank, whose members included representatives from Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. It would be immune from any country's laws and politics, the luggage of its members not subject to search by the police forces of any nation. The members of BIS were and are economic and financial diplomats, whose loyalty is not to the countries that sired them, but to the Bank itself. Until 1977, in fact, the location of its headquarters in the Swiss town of Basel, hidden behind a chocolate shop, was a secret known only to a few. Outsiders were – and are – not permitted to observe meetings, or even to view the rooms were meetings were held. Its deliberations are secret, save for the annual reports, which presumably have been sanitized of any incriminating evidence.