Europe had suffered disaster, and the Americas naturally could not escape it either. As international trade flourished, economic ties between nations grew ever closer.
After the economic crisis erupted, it was not only downstream manufacturing and retail that suffered grievous losses. The middlemen—the wholesalers—and the upstream raw-material suppliers, not one of them escaped unscathed.
Argentine beef and soybeans became hard to sell; Chilean copper and saltpeter piled up unsold; cotton in the Confederate States rotted in the fields. Naturally, the United States of America, which had gone furthest down the road of industrialization, suffered the worst losses.
There was no helping it. Once the economic crisis broke out, massive dumping followed. Britain and Austria shared the same interests in this regard; it could even be called the common will of all European nations. The Americans after their split simply lacked the confidence to refuse.
Not only was their market hit hard, but even more tragically, British capital withdrew its investments from the United States of America at the critical moment in order to deal with the domestic crisis.
Strikes, unemployment, and surging populism spread like wildfire. The "Free Silver" movement of 1892 in particular further aggravated the crisis.
Silver prices had been falling for quite some time. The "Free Silver" policy undoubtedly sent the dollar down the road of depreciation and inflation.
It was not that Americans did not understand the consequences of the "Free Silver" policy; they had mainly been forced into it. Faced with competition from European industrial and commercial goods, domestic American enterprises had almost no ability to fight back.
To protect domestic industry, the United States Government had no choice but to adopt stimulus policies. As for the aftereffects, ordinary people naturally had to foot the bill, with farmers undoubtedly suffering the greatest losses.
But the