JAPAN’S TRADING POSITION

Press, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 26855, 7 October 1952, Page 7

JAPAN’S TRADING POSITION

Favourable Export Balance

(Rec. 10 p.m.) NEW YORK. October $. For the time being Japan was in excellent shape to resume service on her dollar and sterling bonds, said Burton Crane, financial writer, in the “New York Times” today. Japan had built up a foreign exchange account that • included 676.000.000 dollars and £100,000,000 on August 31 last. It was well to rer member that the total gold and foreign exchange resources of the United

Kingdom today were only about 1,500.000.000 dollars. Japan’s foreign trade today showed a comfortably favourable balance of exports. Last vear it was 333,000,000 dollars. For the first half of this year it was 325,000,000 dollars. Both figures included invisible trade. The debt service on dollar and sterling bonds next year, including sinking fund payments, will be only 38,075,000 dollars if the proposals for settling Japan’s pre-war foreign bond debts are accepted by bondholders. Even if agreement is reached with French creditors, giving them the same yen-franc ratio they enjoyed in 1932, the total Japan will need in the year can hardly exceed 39,000,000 dollars. Crane said these figures might come as a surprise to many investors because the statistics prepared by the occupation of General MacArthur were arranged to show an almost in? variable adverse balance of trade. This was -accomplished by showing all the funds received from the Americans—which had been simnle aid in the beginning—as imports for which no goods had been sold in payment. After the Korean war began, however, a greater and greater proportion of payment tp the Japanese took the form of goods and services that might have been exported if not sold at home.