SPEND TO SAVE

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LX, Issue 11045, 20 February 1933, Page 4

SPEND TO SAVE

SIR H. BELLMAN' AND A, PATRIOTIC DUTY. The “need for wise and generous spending” was urged by Sir Harold Bellman, managing director of the Abbey Road Building Society, in a speech given at a dinner at Chiltern Court, London, last month. Systematic expenditure in place of unnecessary retrenchment would, he said, do much to stimulate our trade and industry. “In this decade we have witnessed two extremes —the first when we observed public extravagance and reckless expenditure. In those days we preached thrift so successfully that the savings entrusted to the care of building societies grew to more than £400,000,000. Now the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, and we see a tendency to parsimony in place of profligacy. There is something akin to reckless saving. It is now our patriotic duty to discourage that saving, which is tantamount to hoarding, and to urge in the wider national interest’s generous and reproductive expenditure.” For those whose incomes had not been diminished and who had a comfortable reserve, it was a duty to spend courageously. Paradoxically, we have to spend to save. The householder, for instance, could contribute materially not only to his own comfort but also to the stimulation of trade by buying new furnishings, by installing labour-sav-ing equipment, by modernising heating systems, ui redecorations, and by structural improvements. Those were specific instances of worth-while expenditure. —‘ Christchurch Press.”