So smug were the bankers and economists that they even allowed themselves to be convinced that the discipline of “sound money” itself would bring everyone to their senses and force an end to the war. On August 30, 1914, barely a month into the fighting, Charles Conant of the New York Times reported that the international banking community was very confident that there would not be the sort of “unlimited issue of paper [money] and its steady depreciation,” which had wrought such inflationary havoc in previous wars. “Monetary science is better understood at the present time than in those days,”
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