For all of my snark not one of you has actually offered a contemporary document outlining how the Entente who primarily consisting of countries like Britain and France have a history of at least trying to honour war debt, win, lost or draw and in Britain's case at this time an unblemished one might be considered a totally unacceptable risk. In fact when I pointed out that the private lenders of OTL did not actually lose money, they just did not make as much as they expected it provoked outrage.
Well, going by the Wiki, British public debt went from 650 million pounds in 1914 to 7.4 billion in 1919. Does a tenfold increase in debt sound like something that could be easily repaid? I'm sure it does, but I'll wait to hear it from you as to why. The scale of their obligations was significantly over a hundred percent of GDP, and not seen since the Napoleonic Wars.
Indeed what we have here is precisely BooNZ trying to sell me a used bridge without the documentation that demonstrates that he is a legal agent for the sale.
I may be mistaken, but if we're comparing accounts for how the rest of the war goes, and you're arguing that American investors will happily fork off unsecured loans (at zero percent interest, perhaps?), then the burden of evidence is now on you for that projection.
How badly do any of you envisage Britain and France losing with US credit?
Well, part of these scenarios involves the morale and manpower issues from a lack of an American DOW, which I'm not sure you addressed yet, but would be detrimental in Russia and France especially as far as maintaining political will goes. There's also the question of their overall strategy in the absence of American reinforcements, which you did address, presuming that they'd adopt an ahistorical strategy of assuming the blockade alone would win the war for them, despite a complete lack of historical precedent for such a strategy. And given that you abandoned that line of discussion when I pointed out that your chosen example (WWI, ironically), did have land victories and wasn't an example of a war won
solely through blockade, I'm guessing you know as well as I do that it's unrealistic for the Entente to start fighting defensively when they never did that in the OTL war.
Seriously as it has been pointed out by scholars such as Ferguson that the Germans could have honoured their debts post-world war had they chosen and they lost.
I always take Niall Ferguson with a fistful of salt, but that's just me. As for this assertion, it's hardly a fair comparison, since however bad the Entente's fiscal situation could get, at least their obligations would be a fixed number. The Versailles Reparations, by contrast, were subject to change by the Reparations Committee, which could, post-1921, "modify the form of the payments", to quote
Part VIII, Article 234. IOTL, that generally involved limiting the scale of the payments and postponing them in response to German economic weakness, but in general it gave the Entente the power to shift the goalposts as much as they wanted. The more Germany could pay, the more they would have to pay, and so they had the incentive to avoid looking solvent in order to reduce the scale of the obligations. So no, not quite the same situation at all, paying 7.4 billion pounds is infinitely easier than paying whatever can be paid/looted for twenty years, just on an ontological level.