BANK OF ENGLAND

Southland Times, Issue 21425, 20 June 1931, Page 5

BANK OF ENGLAND

THE COMING REPORT LABOUR DAILY’S VERSION DENIED DECLARED A TRAVESTY (Unital Frew A»sn.—By Telegraph-Copyright.) London, June IS. Mr McMillau has officially issued a statement that the Daily Herald's forecast of the Finance and Industry Committee’s report is entirely unauthorized and a complete travesty of the contents. The committee hopes to present its report next week. ANOTHER NEWSPAPER FORECAST. (Rec. 7.40 p.m.) London, June 19. Despite an official denial of the statements contained in the Daily Herald’s forecast of the McMillan report, the financial correspondent of the Evening Standard agrees that the report will seriously question the Bank of England’s financial policy. He says the committee is justified in raising the issue that the bank's policy has been the major influence in our loss of exports, growing unemployment, and loss of industrial capital. Some committee men hold that the bank has failed to keep in touch with industrial requirements and followed too rigidly pre-war conceptions. The automatic working of.the gold standard restricted credit when release would have led to an improvement in trade, and injured the export trade by embargoes on foreign loans and the maintenance of unnecessarily high money rates. HELP TO AUSTRIA FAVOURABLY RECEIVED. (British Official Wireless.) (Rec. 5.5 p.m.) Rugby, June 18. The news that the Bank of England had made an interim advance of 150,000,000 schillings to the Austrian National Bank pending the completion of negotiations for an international loan to the Austrian Government to provide the necessary funds to guarantee the liabilities of the Credit Anstelt was received in Vienna with an expression of keen satisfaction. The promptitude of the Bank of England’s action was warmly approved in financial circles here.

The City editor of the Evening News says that since the war the Bank of England has consistently pursued a policy designed to promote general world stability under the conviction that world monetary conditions are now so bound up together that every industrial country depends for prosperity on the measure of general stability. Its entry into the present Austrian complication after an appeal by the Austrian authorities is actuated by this motive. The City editor of the Evening Standard, commenting on the more assured feeling in markets reported from German financial circles, of which features of promise are that some money has already returned to Germany and that the Reichsmark has been steadied, says: “The most important factor leading to greater confidence in Germany is the help which the Bank of England is giving Austria. The credit granted to Austria should be the means of restoring stability in that country and increasing confidence throughout Central Europe.” A feature of the foreign money market in London to-day was the sharp recovery in German bonds.