Period Of Shock, Crisis Predicted For 1948

Northern Advocate, 16 June 1947, Page 4

Period Of Shock , Crisis Predicted For 1948

(Received 11 a.m.) NEW YORK, June 15. “FINANCIALLY, Europe is bleeding to death,” said the Under Secretary of State (Mr Dean Acheson) in a speech at Middleton, Connecticut. He predicted that a period of shock and crisis would come in 1948.

“Two years of crop failures in Europe and one in the Far East, the severest winter in a half-century and the inefficiency of industrial plant due to depreciation have upset all calculations of recovery,” he said. NOT ONLY EUROPE

“Europe has had to use its resources of foreign money and credits, carefully husbanded to restore and improve equipment, merely to keep alive.

‘ Nor will the crisis be merely European. “We today are selling twice the value of goods which customers can pay for with their sales to us.

“The loss of these will have a profound repercussion throughout the United States.” Mr Acheson said minority Communist regimes had acted to bind Eastern Europe to exclusive economic relations with the Soviet Union.

Greece’s recovery had been delayed by civil disturbances abetted by Greece’s northern Communist-control-led neighbours, a cynical, barefaced coup d'etat occurred in Hungary, and Russian unwillingness had delayed economic unification of Germany. In the Far East recovery and political stability was retarded largely because Russia had dismantled industries in Manchuria, obstructed unification in Korea and not returned Dairen to China as a free port. Mr Acheson added that the Soviet Union had obstructed world recovery by policies diametrically opposed to the premises of international accord.