AMERICAN FINANCE.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 55, Issue 128, 12 March 1935, Page 6

AMERICAN FINANCE.

HEATED DEBATE IN SENATE. MEMBERS’ ANGRY WORDS. WASHINGTON, Feb. 22. An acrimonious debate, with a particularly heated speech by Senator Carter Glass, developed in the Senate yesterday on the suggestion of exPresident Hoover that the United States Government should stabilise the dollar at the present value (59 cents) and return to the gold standard. Senator Connally was declaring that the United States was, in effect, still on the gold standard, when Senator Carter Glass shouted: “We are on a flat currency basis and under the Supreme Court decision, we are on a flat bond basis. The Court says that what Congress did was a cheat and a repudiation. The Court adds that, if those who were cheated and repudiated undertake to go to Congress to get what’s due to them, they can go to hell.”

Senator Connally retorted: “What do. you want gold for? You cannot eat it and you cannot wear it except tor barbaric ornaments.”

“You cannot get it, anyway,” interrupted Senator Glass, amid disorder. Then he added: “1 wonder what foreign debtors will think of the measure of our sincerity in reproaching them for repudiating their indebtedness to us when Congress has repudiated the most sacred indebtedness that any nation on earth ever incurred. That was when it fought in the World War.”

Many events suggest that the United States’ financial worries, which seemed to ly: lifted by the Supreme Court’s decision on the dollar devaluation, are by no means at an end. Ex-president Hoover’s statement that the country will not recover confidence until, it is assured that devaluation will not go further now that the Administration’s hands are freed, was reflected in Wall Street yesterday, when the Stock Exchange opened with another selling wave, which removed the last vestige of gains recorded on Monday after delivery of the gold judgments. The confidence and co-operation of November and December seem to have gone, and the nation is watching Washington, where the Government is almost exclusively engaged in planning relief for the unemployed, and devising new schemes which will cost money. There is a widespread feeling that the nation is approaching a turning point. The choice is between solvency along orthodox lines and a plunge into deeper debt and paper money. Republican leaders are beginning to emerge from their silence, and raise their voices against what they call the “New Deal gone wild.” Mr Hoover in advocating an immediate return to the gold standard and the fixing of the present value of 59 cents, demands that all threat of further devaluation should be removed. Until tin’s is done, he says confidence cannot be restored, and 12,000,000 men will continue to remain out of work.