SHATTERED CONFIDENCE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20863, 4 May 1931, Page 8

SHATTERED CONFIDENCE.

The New South Wales Government Savings Bank having closed its doors, the deposits of those who had entrusted their savings to its keeping having been rendered unavailable, it is natural that other people with resources in similar institutions should easily give way to nerves. This explains the rush in Sydney to withdraw from the Commonwealth Savings Hank, a movement that practically developed into a run on the bank on Saturday morning. The acute anxiety felt by some people is shown by their action in using safe deposit receptacles for (he notes in which they will have been paid—forgoing interest and paying instead for the mere- physical guardianship of paper money. Their fears may be epiite unfounded, but the existence of them is eloquent proof of (he degree in which the distrust of political financiers has permeated the community. The politicians have been told that their schemes to manipulate credit in the endeavour- to bolster up public finances are bound to recoil on the whole community, inflicting the worst hardship on those with fewest possessions. They have admitted it, but they have gone on their own way. Now the harvest of their doings has ripened. To call inflation and repudiation by oilier names neither alters their character nor averts any of their consequences. Whatever has been said by way of denial there is no escaping the fact that talk of repudiation, and then acts of repudiation, were the chief factors causing the collapse of the New South Wales Savings Rank. The events followed one another too closely and too directly for their relationship to be effectively disputed. The shattering of public confidence that caused the wholesale withdrawals which closed the doors

of the State bank, intensified by that very happening, can be held directly responsible for the run on the Federal institution. The two events thus trace back to the one source, the irresponsibility of men who have been placed in control of the public finances. The whole sorry business is eloquent of the mischief wrought by the recklessness and irresponsibility that at present dominate public affairs in New South Wales.