HOME BUYING THE TEST

Franklin Times, Volume XXII, Issue 58, 20 May 1932, Page 2 (Supplement)

HOME BUYING THE TEST

DEFINING NATIONAL SECURITY AND PROSPERITY. Professor F. W. Ogilvie, in a speech at Edinburgh, reported in the Financial News,” said: “Even when the annual international balance-sheet is drawn up with the greatest care, it is not possible to deduce anything regarding a country’s economic prosperity. It is a common pastime to try to use the foreign balance-sheet of a country as an index of its prosperity, but a foreign balance-sheet tells nothing of the state of prosperity of a country, mainly because it can tell nothing of the course and still less of the consequences, of indebtedness. There is a tendency to regard exports as some measure of a country’s excess of production over -consumption, but even where that is true it tells us nothing important of the relation between production on the one hand and consumption on the other. A so-called favourable balance of trade may arise just as much 'from a shrunken consumption, or from the collapse of the possibilities of investment, as from a healthy growth of production. As economists have long insisted, the figures of consumption at home are in many ways a far better index of prosperity than the foreign trade figures.”