The Economic Consequences of the PeaceKeynes, John Maynard
History
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
Keynes, John Maynard
Economic history -- 1918-1945; Treaty of Versailles (1919 June 28); World War, 1914-1918 -- Economic aspects
[161] The figures in this table are partly estimated, and are
probably not completely accurate in detail; but they show the
approximate figures with sufficient accuracy for the purposes of the
present argument. The British figures are taken from the White Paper of
October 23, 1919 (Cmd. 377). In any actual settlement, adjustments would
be required in connection with certain loans of gold and also in other
respects, and I am concerned in what follows with the broad principle
only. The total excludes loans raised by the United Kingdom on the
market in the United States, and loans raised by France on the market in
the United Kingdom or the United States, or from the Bank of England.
[162] This allows nothing for interest on the debt since the
Bolshevik Revolution.
[163] No interest has been charged on the advances made to
these countries.
[164] The actual total of loans by the United States up to date
is very nearly $10,000,000,000, but I have not got the latest details.
[165] The financial history of the six months from the end of
the summer of 1916 up to the entry of the United States into the war in
April, 1917, remains to be written. Very few persons, outside the
half-dozen officials of the British Treasury who lived in daily contact
with the immense anxieties and impossible financial requirements of
those days, can fully realize what steadfastness and courage were
needed, and how entirely hopeless the task would soon have become
without the assistance of the United States Treasury. The financial
problems from April, 1917, onwards were of an entirely different order
from those of the preceding months.
[166] Mr. Hoover was the only man who emerged from the ordeal
of Paris with an enhanced reputation. This complex personality, with his
habitual air of weary Titan (or, as others might put it, of exhausted
prize-fighter), his eyes steadily fixed on the true and essential facts
of the European situation, imported into the Councils of Paris, when he
took part in them, precisely that atmosphere of reality, knowledge,
magnanimity, and disinterestedness which, if they had been found in
other quarters also, would have given us the Good Peace.
[167] Even after the United States came into the war the bulk
of Russian expenditure in the United States, as well as the whole of
that Government's other foreign expenditure, had to be paid for by the
British Treasury.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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