war resources. In 1914, a friend of the family, Fernand Benon, arranged for young Monnet to meet French Premier René Viviani in Bordeaux to talk about this issue; Monnet managed to convince the French government to agree with him, in principle. However, during the first two years of the war, Monnet did not have much success pressing for a better organization of the allied economic cooperation. It was not until two years later that stronger combined efforts like the Wheat Executive (end of 1916) and the Allied Maritime Transport Council (end of 1917) were set into motion, adding to the overall war effort. Interwar period At the Paris Peace Conference, Monnet was an assistant to the French minister of commerce and industry, Étienne Clémentel, who proposed a "new economic order" based on European cooperation. The scheme was officially rejected by the Allies in April 1919. Due to his experience organizing inter-Allied committees during the war, Monnet was asked to take on the job of Deputy Secretary-General of the League of Nations by French premier Georges Clemenceau and British statesman Arthur Balfour, upon the League's creation in 1919 and after Élie Halévy had declined to take the position, which was reserved for a French national. Monnet left the League of Nations at the end of 1922. He says "I certainly did not leave out of disenchantment with the League's weakness" and he believed "a great deal more could usefully be done." However, he felt it necessary to devote himself to managing the cognac family business, Monnet Cognac, which was experiencing difficulties. In 1925, Monnet moved to America to accept a partnership in Blair & Co., a New York bank which merged with Bank of America in 1929, forming Bancamerica-Blair Corporation which was owned by Transamerica Corporation. He returned to international politics and, as an international financier, proved to be instrumental to the economic recovery of several Central and Eastern Europe nations. He helped stabilise the Polish zloty in 1927 and the Romanian leu in 1928. In November 1932, the Chinese Minister of Finance invited Jean Monnet to act as chairman of an east–west non-political committee in China for the development of the Chinese economy where he lived (with a six-month interruption) until early 1936. During his time in China, Monnet's task of partnering Chinese capital with foreign companies led to the formal inauguration of the China Development Finance Corporation (CDFC) as