UNITED STATES WORLD TRADE

Manawatu Standard, Volume L, Issue 145, 19 May 1930, Page 11

UNITED STATES WORLD TRADE

“SAID TO NEED LOWER BARS.” VIEWS OF AN AMERICAN. “MUST BUY MORE TO SELL MORE.” (Special to the Christian Science Monitor.) BUFFALO. N.Y., March 6. That friendly relations must be fostered among nations, since growing interdependence makes the world, a large economic family, was the themo of the opening day of Buffalo’s first international foreign trade convention on "March G. 'the convention was sponsored by the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce to celebrate the opening of a Niagara area office of the bureau of foreign and domestic commerce. Many approaches to the foreign trade problem were explained to 250 visiting delegates by nationally known experts. The century .and more of friendly relations between Canada and the United States was a keynote sounded by Samuel B. Botsford, general manager of the Buffalo Chamber. The motto of the convention was, “greater prosperity through foreign trade.” The United States lias now como to the point where it must lower import restrictions and buy more goods from Europe, if it expects to continue to sell a considerable volume of goods abroad, according to Dr. Benjamin M. Anderson Jr., economist of the Chase National Bank. Since a reaction in this country's export trade is under way and a reaction in the export trade of the principal countries of Europe is also manifest- in the latest reported figures, the situation, he said, justifies a reexamination of the fundamental laws of international trade. HOW CREDIT MULTIPLIES “Between 1914 and the end of 1929,” said Dr. Anderson, “a period of 15 years, we have had an excess of exports over imports of over 25,000,000,000 dollars. During this same period, however, we have given the outside world credit of over 25,000.000,000 dollars when we combine our purchases of foreign securities, our repurchase of American securities held abroad before the war and the loans made by the United States Government during the war to our allies. “As the foreign debt has grown, the foreigner has been obliged to use an ever-growing percentage of the dollars which lie obtains in making interest payments on past borrowings. He consequently has available a steadily diminishing percentage of his dollars to use in buying our goods. “The debts of the outside world to us are ropes about their necks, by means of which we pull them toward us. Our trade restrictions are pitchforks pressed against their bodies, by means of which we hold them off. (Let me say, parenthetically, that trade restrictions in many foreign countries are far worse than our own.) But tor the period from the middle of 1924 to the middle of 1928, we steadily eased tlie strain by feeding out much more rope. MUST BUY MORE. “But the outside world has borrowed, during the extraordinary 12 months ending June 30, 1928, very much more than it needed to make current payments on interest account and to make current payments on export account. There remained a surplus of dollars in foreign hands which carried our export trade on, until very recent months, in pretty satisfactory shape, the export slump coming in the last two months of 1929 and early 1930.” “It is therefore clear,” concluded Dr. Anderson, “that only a very great and ever growing volume of foreign securities placed in our market would permit us simultaneously to maintain both our export trade and our import restrictions. I see no reasonable ground for thinking we can do this. We must buy more if we are to sell enough.” All nations are obliged to help one another in time of financial trouble, for poor relations are as much of an embarnassment in international affairs as in domestic life, the convention was told by William L. Cooper, director of the bureau of foreign and domestic commerce. “The interdependence of nations," he said, “has become an accepted fact, but we still have people in the United States who would have us an isolated, self-contained country without foreign commerce and relation. We can no more revert to such a condition than turn backward the hands of time.” Foreign trade must be a manysided affair, with an exchange between nations of products, services or gold, ho declared.