STATE INTERFERENCE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22195, 23 February 1934, Page 9

STATE INTERFERENCE

INDUSTRY AND FINANCE WARNING BY BANKER. ' LONDON, February 2. At a, meeting of Lloyds. Bank, Ltd., the chairman, Mr J. W. Beaumont Pease, uttered.a warning against the' increasing tendency on the part of Governments .to interfere in industrial and financial affairs. Mr I 'Pease said that- economic theories were being bandied about from one expert to another, while struggling trade was still groping to find a practical way past the same old obstacles in the present state of disequilibrium between production and consumption, and between one productive industry and another. "It is necessary that some comprehensive policy of conscious planning should be adopted," said Mr Peaee. " Possibly it is also necessary that- some motive force to start such operations should be supplied and directed by the Government. However, I do not believe any Government or bureaucracy is capable of shouldering the heavy responsibility of saying how a nation's industries should be run; or that those industries can be active and prosperous when thay are confined in a strait-jacket designed, not by those who have to wear it, bit by theorists who think they have a genius for planning other people's clothes. "No suggestion could be more unpopular than the proposed nationalisation of banking," continued Mr Pease. "The malfunctions of a banker are two-fold. He must be the guardian of the people's cash resources, and the handmaid—not the dictator—of industry. We have not failed in the first of these functions. I am certain the people have no wish to see their savings taken out of our safe keeping and transferred to any Government, to be used for political aims. On the other hand, industry and the public generally not unnaturally fear that if the. State attemps to usurp the secondary function, it wjll soon cease to be a helpful handmaid to industry, and end by becoming a dictator, with unhappy results for all. "In spite of many uncertainties, and although miiny perplexities still hamper our path, we have made distinct progress along the road to recovery. That Un\s view is shared by the investing public is shown by the large increase in tne quoted value of industrial securities, which runs into hundreds of millions of pounds. All accepted signs point in this direction."