Abstract

Finance

The war uncertainties, the derangement of foreign commerce, and the midwinter interruption of industrial activities, along with the difficult financial conditions created by the new loans and taxes at home and by the disturbed international markets, had in some degree produced effects on a critical economic situation. There can be no doubt that an extremely critical condition had arisen in regard to the food supply of the European allies. With their own grain production heavily curtailed, and with Soviet Union's crops first cut off by blockade and then reduced to insignificance by the lapse of the whole industrial situation into anarchy, Western Europe found itself bare of food reserves and reduced to absolute reliance on overseas producing states.