On December 5, he dropped his bombshell on Berlin. Without warning he issued a public statement in which he accused the government in inflammatory language of “twisting” the Young Plan and failing to take the necessary steps to control its own finances. Declaring that it would be “self-deception” for the German people to believe that the nation could pay a pfennig more than it had agreed to in Paris, he publicly repudiated the plan’s latest revisions. A few weeks later, he sabotaged the government’s attempt to raise a loan in New York through the American investment house of Dillon Read.
