The Fee That Stayed in Kingston

In 1975 an American actress flew to Jamaica to shoot television commercials for a property company. She was paid in Jamaican dollars and then found she could not take them home. Jamaica’s exchange controls, tightening under Michael Manley’s government as foreign currency ran short, kept the money on the island. According to her New York Times obituary, the choice was simple: forfeit the fee or spend it before the flight.

Andrea True spent it. She brought over a New York songwriter, Gregg Diamond, hired local musicians and cut a demo of a song the two of them had been working on. The record was finished in New York, and a remix by Tom Moulton, the man widely credited with inventing the dance remix, made it a dance floor staple. Released fifty years ago this year, “More, More, More” reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100, topped the American disco chart and went to number five in Britain.

True’s earlier career usually takes the headline. She had made dozens of adult films in New York, and the song’s knowing innuendo traded on it. She wanted out, and said she would rather wait tables or type letters than make another. But the more interesting part of her story is economic. The government in Kingston told her money it could not leave. It did not tell it what to become. So it became a record, and of all things, one called “More, More, More”. The title turned out to be a forecast.

And then the record refused to stay put.

In the summer of 1998 a Toronto musician named Marc Costanzo sat down to breakfast with friends after a rave that had run through the night. One of them, Brendan Canning, later a founder of Broken Social Scene, put on some old disco. “More, More, More” came round. Costanzo fixed on the instrumental bridge, looped about nine seconds of it, and wrote a song over the top for himself and his sister Sharon to trade lines on. They recorded it on an old eight track machine and nearly did not release it. “Steal My Sunshine” became one of the songs of the summer of 1999, a top ten hit in Britain and America and a Juno nominee, with Gregg Diamond credited as a cowriter.

That was only the most famous afterlife. Bananarama covered the song in 1993, and Rachel Stevens took her version to number three in Britain in 2004. It has turned up in films from Go to Zack and Miri Make a Porno to The Idea of You, and in more DJ sets, bootleg edits and mashups than anyone could count. Last year Billboard ranked it 36th among the best dance songs of all time. Money that could not leave Jamaica became a record that has never stopped leaving.

That is the oldest lesson of capital controls, and governments keep relearning it. Money told to stay does not sit still. It looks for the nearest open door and walks through it in a different shape. And once it has changed shape, nobody controls where it goes next.

Israel knows this better than most countries, because it was partly built through such a door. In August 1933 the Anglo-Palestine Bank, the Zionist Federation of Germany and the Reich Economics Ministry agreed the Haavara, or Transfer, Agreement. German Jews who could not take their savings out paid them into blocked accounts; the money bought German goods for Palestine, and they were repaid in local currency on arrival. It cut across the Jewish boycott of Germany and has been argued over ever since, but it helped some 60,000 people reach Palestine before the war. Money that could not cross a border as money crossed it as German export goods.

The state that followed lived under its own controls for half a century. Israelis could not freely hold foreign currency or invest abroad, and the local currency was something people tried to get out of. The controls came down in stages through the 1990s, and the Bank of Israel lifted the last of them, on institutional investors, on 1 January 2003. The money that then poured into Israeli technology came partly because it knew it could leave. Capital, like a guest, arrives more readily when it can see the door.

Which brings us to Brussels. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, roughly €185 billion of Russian central bank money has sat immobilised at Euroclear, the Belgian securities depository, part of some €210 billion frozen across Europe. Euroclear’s quarterly results disclosed last week that a Moscow court had, on 22 October, thrown out its appeal against a ruling ordering it to pay Russia’s central bank around $250 billion, a ruling Euroclear says has no jurisdiction over it. On Friday four European and Canadian politicians proposed moving the money out of Euroclear’s custody and into the EU’s own hands, to carry Ukraine through 2029. They called it the “Russian Transfer”. Ninety three years after Haavara, Europe is again arguing over how frozen money might be made to move.

Kingston suggests the argument will not stay open for ever. Frozen money builds pressure, and pressure finds an outlet: a loan, a settlement, a chip on the table at a peace negotiation. The danger for Europe is not that the money becomes something. It is that it becomes something by accident rather than by design.

For Israel the lesson is closer to home than it looks. Israel collects customs and import taxes on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, and under Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich it has deducted or frozen much of that money. In April his office said it had deducted around 590 million shekels of the 740 million collected that month to settle outstanding bills, and frozen the rest in protest at the Authority’s moves against Israel in international forums. Earlier this year the Palestinian finance minister put the total withheld at about 13 billion shekels. Israel has its reasons, and the Authority’s payments to prisoners’ families are a real grievance. But Kingston’s lesson does not care about reasons. Money stopped from going where it was meant to go does not vanish. It becomes unpaid salaries, a hollowed authority, and a vacuum someone else will be glad to fill.

The other lesson is about precedent. Every country that holds reserves abroad now knows that a sovereign balance can be frozen by a vote in another capital. Israel has every reason to back the Western stand against Moscow, and it has spent two years listening to campaigners and some governments talk openly of embargoes. A precedent, once set, does not ask whose money is next. A currency’s strength is measured less by the walls around it than by how few people want to climb them.

Andrea True never repeated the success. Later albums flopped, surgery on her vocal cords ended her singing, and she spent her last years in Woodstock, living largely on royalties from one song, revived each time someone else found it. She died in 2011. Asked how she wished to be remembered, she said as someone who brought people joy, then added: with her music.

Jamaican accounts place her session at Federal Records, the island’s first recording studio, on what is now Marcus Garvey Drive. In 1981 Ken Khouri sold it to Rita Marley and it became Tuff Gong, refurbished and reopened this March. The fee is long spent. The room is still recording, and nobody in it was ever told what paid for that song.