Up to April 1917 the Entente had borrowed in the United States to fund purchases from the US and overseas. A condition attached to all US congressional appropriations was that the dollars lent must be spent exclusively in America. After April 1917 the US Federal government was operating a gigantic, publicly funded export scheme. The American fiscal apparatus and the productive capacity of American business were harnessed together as never before. No previous ‘financial hegemony’ exercised by Spain, Holland or Britain between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries had ever exercised anything
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