It's the right of the borrower to sell any property he has besides collateralized properties. The basic idea therefore is to sell colonies to the US and take the money earned to repay the lenders, which just happen to live in the US. These trades are interconnected as any banker which holds loans to France knows quite well that a sale of French colonies to the US would provide his debitor with funds required to repay. As banks typically prefer money to collateral, we can take as granted that many bankers holding French debt will promote a French proposal to sell their colonies to the US - they'd also promote a French proposal to sell their colonies to Ethiopia if they were solvent just to get their money back.
Fair enough, but even if the US is interested in buying (doubtful) the amounts involved are massive. Iirc the existing (secured) loans totalled about $2.2 billion, and the subsequent borrwing (ie after the US entered the war) brought it up to nine or ten billion. Ok we know from the DWI case that Congeress was willing to cough up $25 million for a Caribbean colony, but this is orders of magnitude greater. Is any conceivable Congress going to vote such expenditures in peacetime, even if colonies to that sort of value are on offer?
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