| Summary: | This chapter deals with the period between the 1923 economic crisis and an even more severe economic breakdown in 1929. This period saw an engagement of the United States in Europe that had not been possible in the immediate postwar years, generating a few years of relative stability and prosperity in which American manufacturing companies and banks played a major role. It was the phase in which the United States succeeded in deploying its superior industrial and financial power in an attempt to uplift the economies of Europe. During those five years it was not only American ideas and practices of rationalized mass production that came to Europe through massive foreign direct investments; rather Europe, again for the first time, got a taste of mass consumption, even if it was still quite limited in terms of affordable consumer durables.
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