BUDGET AND WAR DEBTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21163, 21 April 1932, Page 8

BUDGET AND WAR DEBTS.

American comment on the British Budget makes much of its silence on reparation and war-debt payments, certain prominent politicians interpreting this silence as an assumption that the Hoover moratorium will be continued. Their view of the matter is unjustified. No good purpose would have been served by including figures relating to these payments, in expectation of a resumption of them in the latter half of the current financial year So far as Britain is concerned, no saving could be achieved by merely leaving out the indebtedness to the United States —the omission that is obviously troubling these politicians —for that indebtedness is covered by war-debt payments due to Britain by her debtors, which would similarly become payable at the expiry of the moratorium. But the omission is justified by more than the fact that entries on both sides of the accounts would otherwise have been needlessly made. A point that seems to have escaped the notice of these American critics is that, had the discontinuance of the moratorium been assumed, with the consequent budgeting of reparation afc well as war-debt receipts, there would have been shown a surplus swollen by an additional income that events might make fictitious. In the American comment there is naturally a selection of the national-creditor point of view, and its emphasis on objections to cancellation is evidently a reply to Sir Austen Chamberlain's appeal for American co-operation in solving a problem that is not Europe's only, rather than a criticism of Mr. Neville Chamberlain's Budget. On this aspect of the comment it is enough to say that the whole international question awaits a suggestive answer, first of all, from the reparations conference. In the meantime, it can be only tentatively discussed. What has been said so far in the United States, while it manifests disinclination in some quarters to favour a review of the obligations, is not to be taken as final. White House has maintained complete silence, in keeping with President Hoover's earlier intimuttion that, when Europe has made Tip its mind what it is going to do, the United States will be ready with opinion and decision.