The Daily News SATURDAY, MARCH 11, 1933. RAISING PRICES.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 March 1933, Page 4

The Daily News

SATURDAY, MARCH 11, 1933. RAISING PRICES.

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In the days of defeat and retirement Prince Bismarck, reviewing the history of his country in which he had played so great a part, remarked that it was the unseen forces which upset the calculations of the statesman and the man of affairs. Were Bismarck alive to-day he would see on every hand confirmation of his claim. In whatever direction inquiry is directed the dependence of material forces upon moral and mental energies becomes plain. In a world of abundance there is bitter want, and in a generation in which science and mechanics have done more than ever before to create as well as to serve demand the spectre of unemployment is a grim accompaniment to civilisation in its varying degrees of evolution. In Great Britain, the United States, France, down to the smallest State in Europe, the same trouble exists. Nor are the largely undeveloped Dominions free from the same blight. Wherever inquiry is made the normal spirit of energy and en-

terprise,.courage, hope and progress ie congealed, _ and everywhere men are asking the way out of the gloom.. Naturally, in circumstances which are new, in so far; as that they are worldwide, the number of those who would be guides is legion, and the methods they would adopt are almost as numerous, io some the ; abandonment of as a currency standard would, be the beginning of new prosperity. To others it would be but slipping the anchor which will enable the ship of international trading to ride out the storm, in safety, Another school of political economy teaches that inflation of individual currency will make for individual prosperity for any nation, while another is satisfied that to take that way is to follow a short cut to the financial abyss. Others, again, see in a vast extension of State doles and loans to industrial enterprise the way to economic salvation, while their opponents are convinced that such interference, sustained as it must be by ever increasing taxation of resources that are - rapidly decreasing is only postponing and increasing the ill-effects of the day of reckoning which is inevitable. The one point upon which all economists appear to agree is that there has been a total collapse of the economical suppositions upon which those statesmen who did not believe in leaving the economic destiny of their countries to Providence built up their policies. Proof of this may be found in the suggestion made in the House of Commons this week that Great Britain should “give effect to a whole-hearted policy of raising sterling prices. When such a suggestion could emanate from a member of .the English Conservative party, it is proof that old economical beliefs and standards are in process of Review, if not of abandonment. The. suggestion was supplemented by another, made by a Conservative ex-Minister, that an Empire monetary policy would bring back prosperity to all tne partners in the British Commonwealth of Nations. The suggestions were those of conscientious politicians who. have not the ballast of actual responsibility to keep their economic ideals close to earth. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, had little difficulty or hesitation in ruling out an Empire monetary policy as a saviour of the Empire’s economic future. He was equally blunt in showing that a policy of State doles and grants to industry could not bring back to Great Britain sufficient home trade to make up for the export trade she has lost in the last two years. Mr. Chamberlain had no specific and allembracing remedy. It was not, he intimated, a question of gold or sterling as a standard of currency, though the independent strength of sterling had been a revelation to Great Britain and to the world. With two-thirds of the existing stock of gold held by France and the United States, and with both of those countries showing a greater loss of trade and a more parlous economic condition than that of Great Britain, it was also obvious not only that the gold standard could not save the finances of a country, but that when held in such proportions it became a mockery as an instrument of. internatipnal exchange. What is wanted, according to the Chancellor,. and according to the new President of the United States, is a return of confidence, national and international. It is confidence which will make available for active use resources now frozen by depression; confidence which will encourage enterprise and demand; confidence which by that encouragement will do more than anything else to raise prices, < the ideal, which every economist agrees is the one the world must follow. The renewal of confidence must begin with each nation at home. Thence, as Mr. Chamberlain, pointed, out, it must become international effort, and for that the forthcoming economic conference is the most practical method.. The conference is more: it is the only hope of a world-wide recovery.