He recognized that the choice of the exchange rate ultimately determined how the financial burden of the war was to be shared. It was Maynard Keynes who had first articulated the political dimension to exchange rate policy in the Tract, back in 1923: “The level of the franc is going to be settled, not by speculation or the balance of trade, or even the outcome of the Ruhr adventure, but by the proportion of his earned income which the French taxpayer will permit to be taken from him to pay the claims of the French rentier.”
