WOOL PRICES

New Zealand Times, Volume L, Issue 11684, 23 November 1923, Page 4

WOOL PRICES

The soaring of wool prices is one of the mysteries of the day. Why are the buyers spending all this money? One of the things most insisted on by statesmen and everybody else down to the man-in-the-street is that the chaotic state of Europe is killing trade and industry, and threatening the already tottering civilisation of the world. From a world strangled by the depreciated mark, the British Government, taking refuge in the markets of the British Empire, has precipitated British politics into a general election. All the signs, we are told, are declaring that old Europe is down and out. Yet we have a boom in wool, with representatives of manufacturers sunk in hopeless chaos sending prices of raw material that nobody can use, up to the skies. It is a proclamation that bankrupt Germany is buying; that France, cribbed, cabined, and confined by • all the agencies of depreciation, is buying; that Bradford, unable to sell a thing anywhere, is buying. We are every day invited to Believe that Europe is dying in the last dreary ditch. Yet this moribund continent is buying wool at fever heat in order that manufacturers somewhere may do an enormous and growing business. Now there are stories by people who scoff at the current tales of woe, telling of brisk factory work in . Germany, where there is no unemployment, adding largely to great accumulations of manufactured stocks, and of a similar state of things in France, both countries prepared to dump heaps and heaps of goods into England at prices which the English manufacturer cannot look at. These stories do not explain why Bradford buys at all just now; but they do explain why the Continent rushes into the raw wool market. While this deluge of dumping is imminent, Britain is fighting about protecting herself with a tariff wall—one side apparently anxious to be drowned, the other having some thought of self-preservation. ‘.Woolgrowers are highly delighted, of course. But the world of the average man must see with them that the Continent of Europe is not at death’s door. The fact shows that, however hopeless the political medicine men may be, there is, nevertheless, ground for the hope that things are going to right themselves without waiting for the politicians to devise remedies. Then the politicians will leave off beating the air.