There were wines in Paris and headlines in New York, but was the Hoover Holiday in effect last week? Four nations thought so: Germany, Great Britain, Italy and the U. S. Great Britain was most definite. She sent a letter to the Bank for International Settlements to say that Great Britain considered the Plan already in effect as of July 1, would make no further payments, and would claim none of the monies due her July 15.
In Rome Foreign Minister Dino Grandi announced:
''So far as the Italian Government is concerned, the Hoover Plan is already in force."
Old Paul von Hindenburg cabled humbly from his summer home at Neudeck, East Prussia, to President Hoover:
"Since the Paris negotiations have now arrived at a conclusion, and the one-year moratorium proposed by you has begun, I desire to express the thanks of the German people to you and to the American people. . . ."
President Hoover was not so certain. He kept repeating the gist of his formal announcement, that the Holiday had been accepted "in principle by all the important creditor governments."
But France, the country called upon to make the greatest individual sacrifice, was quite certain that the Plan was not in effect last week. Reporters besieging the Quai d'Orsay could find no French statesman willing to be quoted directly, but came away with a fairly definite statement of the official French position:
France it was true had agreed to the moratorium in principle. Great Britain had called an international conference of financial experts for July 17 to settle the final technical details of the Plan. France would send five delegates to that conference. In the meantime she expected to be paid the Young Plan annuities due her from Germany on July 15 ($17,860,000). Last week she punctiliously placed to Great Britain's credit in the Bank for International Settlements the amount ($3.808,000) she would owe Great Britain at the same time (which the British Treasury hastily announced it would not dream of touching).
Hysteria. As the week progressed it became blazingly apparent that whether the Holiday was in effect or not, a moratorium alone would not save Germany from bankruptcy. She needed cash, lots of it, at once. Germany was growing hysterical. Foreign investors were withdrawing money from Germany to the tune of nearly $20,000.000 a day. German citizens remembering all too vividly the black days of inflation in 1923, were putting all their savings in foreign money, francs, pounds, dollars, and they wanted gold. Bank tellers reported that even paper dollars were spurned by the timorous. Wealthy German families were heading for Switzerland. The $100,000,000 emergency credit extended to Germany last month by the Bank of England, the Bank of France, the Federal Reserve Bank and the Bank for International Settlements, was coming due in less than a week.