“STRONG MEN NEEDED”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24526, 7 February 1941, Page 9

“STRONG MEN NEEDED”

TO THE EDITOR Sir,—" Strong men needed" is the cry of the New Zealand Banker discussing the appointment of Mr Lefeaux's successor in the governorship of the Reserve , Bank, as quoted in your issue ,of Saturday last. The Banker fears what may be done (rejoicing meanwhile that nothing has been done) with the "very wide powers" taken in 1939 by Parliament over the Reserve Bank, unless a governor, is appointed who, like Mr Lefeaux. will follow "the best traditions of British banking" and be strong enough to make Parliament. do what it is told. "The best traditions of British banking " we may remark, were responsible for the slumn of 1921, the return to the gold standard in 1925, with all it involved in conjunction with the ruinous and iniquitous agreement to pay American debts in gold—an agreement equally associated with the names of Lord Baldwin and Mr Montagu Norman. The "best traditions of British banking" were obediently'followed by Mr MacDonald and his colleagues. Sromlnent among them the Socialist hancellor, Mr Snowden, when they pinched the people of Britain and cut down the British Navy in obedience to the dictates of finance. We do not know whether it is in the " best tradition" or net, but it is notorious that British banking has financed British enemies. Did not Mr Churchill predict that the gold sent to Germans' would come back in the form of bombs? "We think." says the Banker, "there is too great :'a tendency to underestimate the of a, strong governor to influence banking policy.- notwithstanding the serious weakening of controls, and the almost complete removal of the! board's independence cf action." The Banker evidently agrees with Mr J. A. C. Osborne, deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, who speaking at Ottawa in April. 1938. said: "The policy of the Government is the policy of the Central Bank, and no respectable central bank would accept a policy from its Government, with which it differed fundamentally. My view is that a Government should appoint a good governor of the bank and then take his advice." But what about the democracy for which we are supposed to be fighting? And what about the world that was to be made safe for poor old democracy 25 years ago by the sacrifice and sufferings of the last war? The world in which, as a matter of fact, the only effective measures were those taken to ensure the safety and perpetuation of the banking system according to the " best British tradition," which we suspect to be synonymous not really with the interests and wishes of the British people, but with the plans and views of the international financier, to whom all countries are alike s 6 long as they are good fields in which to plant loans. The views of the Banker simply boil down to universal control by the representatives of finance, not by the representatives of the people. They assume, with consummate assurance, that such control is the proper thing —but nothing can persuade us that such control is democracy, and heaven help us if we are to fight another war in order to make the world safe for bankers! , .- • A considerable number of people are beginning to think that the place of the banker is to produce the results the people want, to make financially possible whatever is physically possible. The governor of the Bank of Canada had to confess that the physically possible should be also financially possible; and, although he and bis obedient servants in the Federal Government of Canada have done; all they can to thwart the wishes of tha people of Alberta, it is becoming every day clearer to more and more people that this sort of thing cannot be allowed to go on. Poverty and insecurity together with the prospect of an infinite series of bigger and brighter wars do not seem like the ambitions of sane people, and, if democracy means anything at all, it means the realisation within the limits of physical possibility of the desires of the people. What we need is representatives who will see to it that the bankers give us what we want, not what their system demands. Let them alter their system if it will not meet the case. T ' Systems were made for man. not man for systems; and the interest of man, which is selfdevelopment, is above all systems, I am, etc., „ , Troth. Dunedin, February 3.