Last night I was watching a Christmas present of mine: a DVD of "Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain". (Which I would reccomend, by the way.) In episode 1 ("Advance Britannica"-basically dealing with Atlee and Churchill's governments after the Second World War), it was saying how Ol' Clem sent John Maynard Keynes to Washington to try and negotiate this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-American_loan
Keynes, buoyed up by Special Relationship, and convinced of his own economic genius, said he could obtain an eight million pound loan, with no interest. What he actually got was a four million pound loan, which the proviso that certain conditions which protected the pound (Andrew Marr didn't go into detail about these, but they caused the pound to devalue considerably.)
I was just wondering: if, by some miracle of economic justification and manouvering, Keynes actually did manage to get the full eight million pound loan, without interest or any other conditions-what would have happened? Would the New Jerusalem have risen?
I know that this was unlikely (for one thing, the American public disliked it, with 60% against giving the loan-according to Marr, because the UK was both Imperialist and Socialist), but not impossible. What do you think, Alternate Historians?