ABSTRACT
Lend-Lease was not an economic panacea. The British Government continued to worry about the low level of her monetary reserves and about the prospective difficulties of reconverting from wartime to peactime production. The government estimated that exports would have to expand to 150 per cent of what they had been in 1938 in order to get postwar economy on an even keel: thus exports and intimately allied issue of gold and dollar reserves were crucially important. A highly complex and troublesome network of relationships soon developed between the US and the UK involving Lend-Lease, its British equivalent Reciprocal Aid, and Britain's dollar reserves and exports. When White's letter reached London it set off two chains of thought: one of which was directly concerned with the extension of reciprocal Aid and its implications for Britain's dollar balances; the other was to do with Britain's exports.
