Recognizing that those who would provide the capital had enormous leverage, Norman insisted that neither British nor American bankers touch the loan “until the French are out of the Ruhr bag and baggage”; and to preclude any further such preemptive and unilateral military actions by France, the right to declare Germany in default of its payments was to be vested, not in the Reparations Commission, dominated as it was by the French, but in an independent agency to be run by a neutral American.
