I found this on sinclair's web site. from the new yorker
Americans long ago became accustomed to the pleasing notion that there is nothing quite so sound as the dollar. During the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when Pound, Hemingway, and Stein were in Paris, they lived on modest remittances from home which, translated into francs, bankrolled lazy afternoons in the Jardin du Luxembourg and giddy evenings on the Boulevard Montparnasse. “Two people, then, could live comfortably and well in Europe on five dollars a day and could travel,” Hemingway wrote. Near the end of the Second World War, an international conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, confirmed the American currency’s role as the linchpin of the global economy, setting up a system of fixed exchange rates that survived for almost thirty years, and ushering in an age of unprecedented international prosperity. John Maynard Keynes, the leader of the British delegation, acknowledged the new economic reality. He and his fellow-Brits might have the brains, he is said to have commented, but the Americans had the money.
Not anymore, as anybody who has visited Europe recently will confirm. Five dollars for a cup of coffee, a hundred dollars for a mediocre meal, three hundred dollars for a modest hotel room—if Hemingway had been forced to pay such prices, Paris would loom less large in the history of American letters.
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