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[[File:Vincenzo_Laviosa_-_Franklin_D._Roosevelt.jpg|thumbnail|left|300px|Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1932]]__NOTOC__
When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in March 1933, he immediately focused his attention on the domestic economic situation created by the Great Depression. Believing that recovery would come from measures taken at home rather than abroad, he secured Congressional passage of a series of far-reaching domestic economic reforms that would come to be known as the first New Deal.
His doubts about the ability of foreign economic policy to contribute to domestic recovery were reflected in his approach to the London Economic Conference. In June 1933, representatives from 66 countries gathered in London to try to find a way out of the Depression through cooperation in areas such as the reduction of trade barriers and the stabilization of exchange rates.
Countries that remained on the gold standard, such as France, sought to convince countries that had left the gold standard, particularly the United Kingdom (inSeptember in September 1931) and the United States (in April 1933), to agree to stabilize the par values of their currencies. The chances for success were already slim when, on July 3, Roosevelt rejected such an agreement as “a purely artificial and temporary experiment,” asserting that a “sound internal economic situation” was more important to a country’s prosperity than the external value of its currency. The conference ended less than a month later with little to show for its efforts.
====Why was the Export-Import Bank created?====
