Although the public is buying bread at a high price, that price represents a loss to the Government of about a milliard a year.
(3) Exports now leaving the country are valued at only one-quarter or one-fifth of the imports from abroad.

(4) The National Debt is increasing by about a milliard lire per month.

(5) The military expenditure for one month is still larger than that for the first year of the war.
But if this is the budgetary position of France and Italy, that of the rest of belligerent Europe is yet more desperate.

In Germany the total expenditure of the Empire, the Federal States, and the Communes in 1919-20 is estimated at 25 milliards of marks, of which not above 10 milliards are covered by previously existing taxation.

This is without allowing anything for the payment of the indemnity.