In 1927, Americans were not terribly popular in Europe and not popular at all in France. America’s insistence on being repaid in full, with interest, the $10 billion it had lent to Europe during the war seemed a bit rich to the Europeans since all the money borrowed had been spent on American goods, so repaying it would mean that America profited twice from the same loans. That didn’t seem to them quite fair, particularly as the European economies were uniformly wrecked while America’s was booming.
