According to the ratio finally decided at the Spa Conference, France, Great Britain, and Italy are to receive respectively 52, 26, and 10 per cent of whatever reparations Germany finally pays, while Belgium is a preferred creditor of Germany, and Italy has a lien on the major part of Austrian and Hungarian reparations. The figures are only approximate, for they do not take into account compounded interest; and there is some doubt as to the propriety of including the Russian obligations to France, most of which date from before the war and are owing French nationals and not the French Government. Roughly speaking, the United States is the largest creditor, with $11,000,000,000 owing her, while Great Britain follows a close second, with $10,000,000,000 on her books against Continental European countries. Great Britain stands to be the heaviest loser; for the payment of none of her loans is assured, while more than 40 per cent of the American advances is represented by the loan to Great Britain, arrangements for the paying of which with interest have already been concluded. When we consider the short time that the United States was in the war, its cost was staggering. And we must remember that the United States lent no money out of surplus, but that her ability to grant the huge credits to her associates in the World War was due to the successive Liberty loans and the Victory loan, which are internal obligations the interest and amortization charges of which are being carried in our national budget. On the other hand, the money did not actually leave the country, but was spent by the borrowing Governments for goods and food-stuffs manufactured and raised in the United States. The repayment of Great Britain’s debt does not work great hardship either on the British or ourselves; for Great Britain and her Dominions are large holders of American securities and have extensive investments in Mexico and Central and South America. The Continental European belligerents sold most of their North and South American securities during the war. The repayment of $6,500,000,000 to the United States would have to come largely through an excess of exports over imports from the United States.[28] The transfer of surpluses of wealth from one country to another is an economic problem of both reparations and interallied debts that has not yet been solved. In the midst of all our discussion of the insistence upon the settlement of reparations and interallied indebtedness, where is the economist who has shown us how this can be done without the willingness of French markets to absorb German goods and American markets to absorb European goods?