A Brit Birodalom miért nem volt képes felépíteni egyetlen egy ipari mamutvállalatot sem a II.VH előtt?

Új kérdés az ango-rajongó angliai mosogató , pincér és szakmunkás fiúk rokonságának:

https://www.gyakorikerdesek.hu/tudomanyok__tarsadalomtudoman..

A brit gazdaág gyengesége és Uncle Sam segítsége a háború folyamán.

England borrowed quite a bit from the U.S. and it seems unlikely that there were any other sources for the amounts they needed. The numbers are those of John Maynard Keynes and are expressed in millions of Pounds. They are taken from this article that addresses the 100 year anniversary of Keynes’ book The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The article discusses how disordered British finances were as it examines Keynes role in the situation.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace: 100 Years Later | Edward W. Fuller

Loans To: By U.S. By UK By France Total

UK 800 800

France 485 390 875

Italy 275 390 35 700

Russia 38 520 160 718

Belgium 56 90 90 236

Serbia 4 20 30 54

Romania 2 16 35 53

Greece 8 10 15 33

Portugal 10 0 10

Total 1,668 1,451 365 3,484

For comparison, here are England’s revenue and expenditures taken from Devinespark’s link. Again, all numbers are in millions of Pounds.

Revenue

1913-14 198.2

1914-15 226.7

1915-16 336.8

1916-17 573.4

1917-18 707.2

1918-19 889.0

Expenditures

1913-14 197.5

1914-15 560.5

1915-16 1559.2

1916-17 2198.1

1917-18 2696.2

1918-19 2579.3

I find it interesting that the UK borrowed 800 million Pounds all from the U.S but issued loans for amount that approached twice that amount working with an English economy that was less than half the size of the U.S. economy (the economy of the entire British Empire was slightly larger than the U.S. economy.)

There was also currency depreciation of the Pound that later caused major problems when the English over-valued the Pound and wrecked their export trade during the mid-1920’s.

There was quite a bit of profiteering in the U.S. The war was a godsend to the House of Morgan, which received a financial commission on every one of the billions of dollars loaned to the European allies while his associates on the just-established Federal Reserve made sure that credit was plentiful. At war’s peak, Morgan presided each month over purchases which were equal to the gross national product of the entire world just one generation before. The Morgan-dominated newly created Federal Reserve lower interest rates to facility the loaning. The massive debts thus created were a serious source of economic instability after the war.

Indeed, in the very first month of the World War I President Wilson approved a $100 million (at least $5 billion today) Morgan loan to France and as early as September 4, 1914 Morgan had written to the President: “The war should be a tremendous opportunity for America” and by October 15 of the same year US banks were aggressively making war loans – loans made more attractive by the fact that interest rates fell by over 22 percent during 1914 and 1915 as the Federal Reserve helped finance (and lengthen) the war.

In his Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy, Murray N. Rothbard described the picture in the U.S.:

By 1914, the Morgan empire was in increasingly shaky financial shape. The Morgans had long been committed to railroads, and after the turn of the century the highly subsidized and regulated railroads entered their permanent decline. The Morgans had also not been active enough in the new capital market for industrial securities, which had begun in the 1 890s, allowing Kuhn-Loeb to beat them in the race for industrial finance. To make matters worse, the $400 million Morgan-run New Haven Railroad went bankrupt in 1914.

At the moment of great financial danger for the Morgans, the advent of World War I came as a godsend. Long connected to British, including Rothschild, financial interests, the Morgans leaped into the fray, quickly securing the appointment, for J.P. Morgan & Co., of fiscal agent for the warring British and French governments, and monopoly underwriter for their war bonds in the United States. J.P. Morgan also became the fiscal agent for the Bank of England, the powerful English central bank. Not only that: the Morgans were heavily involved in financing American munitions and other firms exporting war material to Britain and France. J.P. Morgan & Co., moreover, became the central authority organizing and channeling war purchases for the two Allied nations.

he United States had been in a sharp recession during 1913 and 1914; unemployment was high, and many factories were operating at only 60% of capacity. In November 1914, Andrew Carnegie, closely allied with the Morgans ever since his Carnegie Steel Corporation had merged into the formation of United States Steel, wrote to President Wilson lamenting business conditions but happily expecting a great change for the better from Allied purchases of U.S. exports.

Sure enough, war material exports zoomed. Iron and steel exports quintupled from 1914 to 1917, and the average profit rate of iron and steel firms rose from 7.4% to 28.7% from 1915 until 1917. Explosives exports to the Allies rose over ten-fold during 1915 alone. Overall, from 1915 to 1917, the export department of J.P. Morgan and Co. negotiated more than $3 billion of contracts to Britain and France. By early 1915, Secretary McAdoo was writing to Wilson hailing the "great prosperity" being brought by war exports to the Allies, and a prominent business writer wrote the following year that "War, for Europe, is meaning devastation and death; for America a bumper crop of new millionaires and a hectic hastening of prosperity revival."

It was the huge debt hangover and the attempt to address it with additional credit that so disordered Western economies during the 1920’s and formed the backdrop to the crash in 1929.