After 60 years, the United Kingdom has finally repaid it’s World War II debts to the United States:
LONDON — More than six decades after the fact, Britain has finally paid back the billions of dollars it had borrowed from the United States and Canada to help pay for rebuilding the country after World War II.
At the click of a few computer keys in London on the last business day of 2006, $83.25 million was sent electronically winging to Washington and $22.7 million to Ottawa, to free Britain from annual installments it occasionally has struggled to pay.
The original loan of $4.34 billion — the equivalent of $27 billion in today’s money — was negotiated by a London team headed by economic mastermind John Maynard Keynes in 1945 to stave off the bankruptcy that posed a serious threat to Britain in the wake of the war’s wreckage.
The Canadian share of the loan was $1.2 billion.
The loan was paid off in 50 installments, the last of which leaves Britain free of that debt for the first time since a devastated Nazi Germany surrendered to Allied forces more than 61 years ago.
Well, better late than never.
