accepted an agreement mediated by the United States in which it received smaller payments, but Poincaré's government fell soon afterward. While the United States experienced a sharp rise in unemployment, France had almost none. Much of that was due to a simple lack of manpower; at the end of the war, France had 1,322,000 dead and three million wounded, almost 4,000,000 casualties. One in four of the dead was younger than 24. That in turn lowered the birth rate, so that by 1938 France still had only half the number of 19- to 21-year-olds it would have had had the war not happened. But whatever the causes of full employment, confidence in the government was high. The French economy was stronger than those of its neighbors, notably because of the solidarity of the franc. The introduction of the US economic model, inspired particularly by Ford, ended suddenly and, with it, the modernization of French businesses. Everything seemed to favour the French; production didn't weaken before 1930, particularly in primary materials, and the country was the world's leading producer of iron in 1930. France felt confident in its systems and proud of its vertu budgétaire, in other words the balancing of the budget, which France had managed more or less for nearly a decade. In 1927, France gained from the world crisis in becoming the world's largest holder of gold, its reserves growing from 18 billion francs in 1927 to 80 billion in 1930. Le Figaro said: "For our part let us rejoice in our timid yet prosperous economy as opposed to the presumptuousness and decadent economy of the Anglo-Saxon races." Problems of financial policy There was a further contrast in the way France and Anglo-Saxon nations viewed their economies. The Anglo-Saxon model encouraged growth of the money stock, but France saw the Depression as a necessary evil that "purged" the excess liquidity in the world economy and pushed indebted companies into failure. Successive governments maintained restrictive policies until 1934, and interest rates were kept high to maintain the attractiveness of the France. The absence of contracyclical policies kept the state budget in balance. In 1934 and 1935, the Pierre-Étienne Flandin government had a less restrictive policy allowing short-term indebtedness. The Banque de France lost 15 percent of its reserves, and the government was replaced by one led by Pierre Laval, who installed a provisionally -deflationist policy before he accepted a