BRITAIN HAD FINANCED THE WAR by liquidating foreign investments, increasing taxes, and borrowing, with the result that the national debt increased twelvefold, to £8 billion ($634 billion in today’s money). This in turn had forced the Conservative government under prime minister Stanley Baldwin to raise taxes yet again in order to service the debt. In 1929, the electorate had reacted by voting in a Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald. Traditionally strongly export-oriented, the British economy had suffered enormously from the interruption to world trade brought on by the Great War, as well
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