WORLD PROBLEMS

Manawatu Standard, Volume IV, Issue 222, 20 August 1931, Page 7

WORLD PROBLEMS

EUROPEAN SITUATION. CANCELLING OF WAR DEBTSBANK DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT. (United Press Association.—By Electric Telegraph.—Copyright.) LONDON, Aug. 19. “I see no prospect of a permanent improvement in trade or unemployment except through a drastic scaling down or the cancelling of reparations and war debts,” declared Hon. Alexander Shaw, a director of the Bank of England, in a speech he delivered at Glasgow in connection with the launching of the P. and 0. liner Carthage. Mr Shaw added: “Whenever trade and employment seems to revive, the eternal question of reparations recurs, and dcnvn everything rolls to the bottom.

“No amount of business energy or financial skill will cure the disease which is keeping British factories and shipyards idle. No jockeying of money values will cure it. Great blocks of the production of certain countries are pledged to be handed over to other countries to pay for past destruction. “The mechanism of foreign exchanges is incapable of carrying such a burden which has been saved in recent years only by the creditor lending the debtor countries the bulk of the funds- with which to pay reparations and war debts.

“Wherever creditor countries grow weary in the process the situation of a debtor' country like Germany grows desperate. Europe then hangs over a pit until an international conference leads to an agreement to continue the lending process.”

Besides being a director of the Bank of England and deputy-chairman of the P. aild 0. Company, Hon. Alexander Shaw, for many years has been prominent in Britain’s public life. In 1927 ho was president of the Chamber of Shipping, and in the war and post-war years he took part in important conferences on questions of alien repatriation, soldiers’ compensation, and war workers’ wages. For a number of years ho sat in the House of Commons.