GOLD FOR AMERICA

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXVI, 13 December 1932, Page 2

GOLD FOR AMERICA

EXTRA PRODUCTION AMOCATED Referring to the war debts as international agreements to ship an agreed weight of gold to tlie United States, Dr. Herbert Levinstein,, in an address at the Imperial College of Science, said that tlie only sensible way to carry, out tins, undertaking was to arrange for this quantity to be obtained by extra production anil not by .■withdrawing it from stock, bv removing it from where it was want, ed for the purpose of international trade and industry ‘Do not, for one moment think that there is in the world a shortage of gold-containing ore,” he said. “The world stock of refined gold is insignificant compared with that contained in known deposits. Consider, the position if the United States of America. had demanded to be paid not iii gold but in bricks, The ..quantity would Lral'e been, large,-; Should we have pulled down our houses in order ■to supply her'; We should have arranged for liner manufacture from clay in tlie usual way and taken good care that the shipments did not prevent us from having all the bricks w r e wanted for our own bousing schemes. But just because the material was gold, the ordinary commercial producers’ outlook wag never adopted. It- is a proved fact. ,t)iat, bad we chosen to pay our £30,000,000 in gold to the United States of America annually by mining weaker ores than private enterprise could have been expected to, the undertaking would have presented no serious difficulty. Now that gold is fetching a premium in terms of sterling new mines are coining into production, financed by experienced people, who see in so doing a handsome profit. Having undertaken to pay the interest or: our war debt to the United States not in goods nor iii sterling, but in gold, the obvious course was to produce ore and to send this gold to them.”