[greenavocado]

The Great Depression was caused by France panic hoarding gold https://www.nber.org/papers/w16350

Semi-ironically France was the reason the US fell off the dollar standard after it panic hoarded gold AGAIN when the French government made one last, massive purchase of gold from the US using US dollars, paying $35/oz. A French warship arrived in New York in early August 1971 to load the gold and bring it back to France.

Reckless spending post WW2 was the main reason the US shot itself in the foot and got into this position where they couldn't reasonably pay most clients back and France saw this developing.

All in all France managed to deal massive blows to the US economy covertly TWICE within the same century.

https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...

[rawgabbit]

Sorry no. France was a wreck of itself after WWI having lost an entire generation of its young men. Germany was even worse off. The US was the economic engine of the world after WWI. Despite the fact the US regulatory institutions was in its infancy. The FED at that time had no teeth. It was only after FDR became president and the continuous bank runs that the FDIC and Glass Steagall (which has been repealed) and modern banking regulations were put in effect. When the US stock market bubble popped and plunged the US into depression, it was the hard money policies such as the Smoot Hawley tariffs and Hoover’s economic hands off policies that made everything worse.

[pfdietz]

And then later in the 1930s as world gold flowed into the US (in response to the rise of the Axis) the economy began to recover here. By the end of the war most gold was in the US.

[chadgpt3]

This still happens today but with instruments other than gold, right? Like foreign owned shares. Today's equivalent would be China owning all the treasury bonds.

[dh2022]

China owns about 7% of us treasury securities and they stopped buying them I think around 2015L: https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-cent...

[mschuster91]

> All in all France managed to deal massive blows to the US economy covertly TWICE within the same century.

And now it seems to be the US' turn in returning the favor. First 2007ff (caused by irresponsible actors in the financial world), then the lackluster response to Covid and Russia's invasion against Ukraine, and now we're set to look at the AI bubble collapsing, a bubble much much larger than Lehman Brothers ever was.