SAVINGS WANTED

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 133, 2 December 1937, Page 34

SAVINGS WANTED

SCHACHT'S PLEA TO GERMANS

Speaking at a savings bank congress at Essen, Dr. Schacht, President of. the Reichsbank and Acting Minister of Economics, referred to the 'necessity for thrift in helping to finance the German re-armament programme (reports the "Daily Telegraph"),

"The uninterrupted stream of savings which must flow into our economic system to keep it alive can only be kept going . through continual thrift," he said. .

: Such saying is indispensable to guarantee the normal course pi our national economics: it is vital when the great burden of re-armament is also imposed.

"We sometimes hear-that re-arma-ment should be.financed by means of taxation alone. That may be all very well theoretically.- But taxes which are really nothing more than compulsory savings must be reinforced by voluntary thrift." -

•. To carry taxation too far, he. added, would destroy the mainspring of economic activity and progress.

Dr. Schacht denounced inflation as a method of financing re-armament. "There are.actually still people in Germany today," he said, "who are naive enough to believe that the printing of bank-notes has lost its terrors because owing to currency control its results can no longer be read every day on the dollar market.

INFLATION DANGERS. *"One thing is certain. If a man refrain's from building a» house a gun can be cast from the steel which he saves. ■ Not a single gun, however, can be constructed out of bank-notes from the printing press, for notes are made of paper and guns of steel.

"But what is more important is that an inflation deprives the exchange of goods of any calculable basis, and an economic system which can make no calculations but depends on chance is doomed. For one man will hoard and another starve, and all production, including'that of weapons, will come to a standstill. . .

. "I-realised, clearly, therefore, when the Fuh'rer entrusted me with a- share of the task of financing German rearmament that I would depend to a decisive extent on the assistance of the German saver. It is also clear to me that if the State made a claim on the savings of the .German people it was. obliged to see that, these savings maintained their value." . *

After producing statistics wlfich, he claimed, refuted, foreign allegations that a secret inflation already existed in Germany, Dr. Schacht rejected the expedient.of. a devaluation with equal emphasis. . . . .

, Kid -gloves ' can be made to look quite n6w. again by rubbing them with the white of an egg after cleaning and drying them. .