payment of reparations would reduce Germany to a state of Asiatic poverty", and that Keynes "held this view, as did all Germans; and probably many Frenchmen". However, he also says these "apprehensions of Keynes and the Germans were grotesquely exaggerated". According to Martel, Taylor "shrewdly concludes that Étienne Mantoux had the better of his controversy with John Maynard Keynes". Stephen Schuker writes that Keynes' "tendentious but influential" book was "ably refuted" by Mantoux. Richard J. Evans says "the economic history of the 1920s and early 1930s seemed to confirm" the arguments of Keynes, yet "as we now know" Keynes' reparation arguments were wrong. Evans says the economic problems that arose were a result of the inflation of 1923, which lay with the German government rather than reparations. According to Slavieck, the "traditional interpretation of the treaty's impact on Germany" was that it "plunged the nation into an economic free fall". This view was shared by the German people, who believed the treaty was robbing Germany of its wealth. German banker Max Warburg said the terms of the treaty were "pillage on a global scale". Niall Ferguson says the German view was incorrect and "not many historians would today agree with Warburg". However, several historians agree with Warburg. Norman Davies writes that the treaty forced Germany to "pay astronomic reparations", while Tim McNeese states, "France and Britain had placed war damages on Germany to the tune of billions of gold marks, which the defeated Germans could not begin to pay in earnest". Ferguson says the reparations were "less of a burden than Keynes and others claimed" and that the "potential burden on national income of the annuity vary from 5 percent to 10 percent". However, he cautions against underestimating the initial German effort to pay. Before the implementation of the Dawes Plan, Germany transferred between eight and 13 billion gold marks, which amounted to "between 4 and 7 percent of total national income". Ferguson says "the annuity demanded in 1921 put an intolerable strain on the state's finances" and that total expenditure between 1920 and 1923 amounted to "at least 50 percent of Reich revenue, 20 percent of total Reich spending and 10 percent of total public spending". Thus, Ferguson says, reparations "undermined confidence in the Reich's creditworthiness" and "were therefore excessiveas the German government claimed". Hantke and Spoerer write that "reparation payments were indeed a severe economic burden for Germany"