FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 6 August 1931, Page 4

FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES

CRITICAL TIMES The gravity of tlie financial situation when President Hoover’s moratorium proposal was announced is apparent from "The Times” comment upon it. "It would, serve no good purpose at this time to discuss whether, or to what degree, these intcr-Governmontal debts had been contributory to the depression they now have made unbearable,” “The Times" remarked. "It is, in any case, admitted that they have played a dangerous part in canalising tho flow of gold from other great commercial nations to the United States, in. whose vaults the metal lies immobilised and sterile. The movement, said Mr Hoover, ‘is lowering the credit stability of many foreign countries.” More bluntly put, there is at stake the very basis and maintenance of the international system known as the gold standard, in a world whose_ members are to-day so linked one with another, so unitedly caught m the vast web of cosmopolitan dealing, that the effect of a collapse of credit at any one of a number of important points can no longer bo localised. Mr Hoover returned to Washington from his Western trip to be told that at more than one of these points such a collapse was imminent, that at ono of these points it had, in fact, been narrowly averted only by extraordinary action taken from outside at the eleventh hour. The situation was, and for some time to come must still lie, grave beyond tho present bounds of discreet expression. ’