confrontation with France over Morocco. In the middle of the crisis, Germany was hit by a financial panic. The stock market plunged by 30 percent in a single day, there was a run on banks across the country as the public lost its nerve and started cashing in currency notes for gold, and the Reichsbank lost a fifth of its gold reserves in the space of a month. Some of this was rumored to have been caused by a withdrawal of funds by French and Russian banks, supposedly orchestrated by the French finance minister. The Reichsbank came close to falling below the statutory minimum of gold backing
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